PR 4202 
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ass-ES^? 



WNARD^S ENGLISH 
XASSIC SERIES 

-WITH EXPLANATORY NOTES 





NEW YORK: 

MAYNARD , MERRILL,& CO 





Class. 
Book. 



>u. 



Copyright }«°. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



MAYNARD'S ENGLISH CLASSIC SERIES.-No. 233-234 



POEMS 



BY 



ROBERT DROWNING 




NEW YORK 
MAYNARD, MERRILL, & CO. 



Two Copies Receivecl " 

DEC 13 1905 

CoDynjht Entry 
CLASS C^ XXc.No. 
I "^ COPY B. 1 

A Complete Course in the Study of English. 

spelling, Language, Grammar, Composition, Literature. 

Reed's Word Lessons— A Complete Speller. 
Reed's Introductory Language Work. 

Reed & Kellogg's Graded Lessons in English. 
Reed & Kellogg's Higher Lessons in English. 

Reed & Kellogg's One-Book Course in English. 
Kellogg & Reed's Word Building. 

Kellogg & Reed's The English Language. 
Kellogg's Text-Book on Rhetoric. 
Kellogg's illustrations of Style. 

Kellogg's Text-Book on English Literature. 



In the preparation of this series the authors have had one object 
clearly in view— to so develop the study of the English language as 
to present a complete, progressive course, from the Spelling-Book to 
the study of English Literature. The troublesome contradictions 
which arise in using books arranged by different authors on these 
subjects, and which require much time for explanation in the school- 
room, will be avoided by the use of the above ** Complete Course." 

Teachers are earnestly invited to examine these books. 

MaYNARD, Merrill, & Co;, Publishers, 

New York. 



Cepyright, 1905, by Maynard, Merrill, & Cc« 



CONTENTS 



PART I 



Introduction, .... 
Critical Opinions, . . ; . 
Saul, 

* Herve Riel, 

* Pheidippides. 

A Grammarian's Funeral, 

■^ Cavalier Tunes, 

Song from Pippa Passes, 

An Epistle Containing the Medical 

Karshish, the Arab Physician, 
Meeting at Night, .... 

Parting at Morning, 
Prospice, . . 

Epilogue, . . . , 

* Evelyn Hope, .... 

* Home Thoughts from the Sea, 

* One Word More, 

PART II 
My Star, 

* Incident of the French Camp, 

* Home Thoughts from Abroad 
Rabbi ben Ezra, . 
Memorabilia, 

Abt Vogler, .... 
*The Lost Leader. 
Andrea del Sarto, 

* '^GooD News from Ghent," 

* The Boy and the Angel, 
By the Fireside, 

My Last Duchess, 



* The poems indicated by an asterisk are those i, 
Regents' Syllabus and for college-entrance examinations. 



Experience 



OF 



PAGE 

4 
n 

13 
31 
Z1 
44 
49 
52 

52 
62 
62 

63 
64 

65 
67 



II 

II 

13 
14 
21 

22 
26 
28 
Zl 
39 
43 
52 



required by the New York 



INTRODUCTION 

Robert Browning was born at Camberwell, a suburb of Lon- 
don, May 7, 1812. From his earliest years he was fond of 
writing verses, and, when twelve years of age, had produced 
poems enough to form a volume. His first published poem, 
Paiilme, appeared in 1833, but his real introduction to the 
public was through Paracelsus, a drama, published in 1835. 
In 1837 the tragedy of Strafford ^2J$> unsuccessfully presented 
at Drury Lane Theater. In 1840 the epic Sordello was pub- 
lished — one of his most characteristic and most difficult works. 
In 1841-46 appeared the series of Bells and Po7negra7iates, 
in eight shilling parts, containing much of his finest poetry, 
including the tragedy^ Blot in the 'Scutche07i and the grace- 
ful dramatic poem Pippa Passes. In 1846 he was married to 
the distinguished poetess, Elizabeth Barrett, and soon after 
established his home in Italy. Christmas Eve and Easter 
Day appeared in 1850, followed by two volumes of short 
poems, Men and IVojnen, 1855, and Dramatis Per so7ice, 1864. 
His greatest work,- The Ri7tg afid the Book, appeared in 
1868-69, closely followed by many other important poems, 
chief of which are Fifi7ie at the Fair, 1872; Red Cott07i Night- 
cap Coii7itry, 1873; Aristophanes' Apology and The Bin 
Album, 1875. Most important of his latest works are Dra- 
7naiic Idyls, 1879-80; Jocoseria, 1883; FerishtaKs Fa7icies, 
1885; Parleyi7igs with Certain People of B7iportance i7i their 
Day, 1887; and Asolando, 1889. He died at Venice, May 12, 
1889. 

The first and perhaps the final impression we receive from 
the works of Robert Browning is that of a great nature, an 
immense personality. The poet in him is made up of many 
men. He is dramatist, humorist, lyrist, painter, musician, 
philosopher, and scholar, each in full measute, and he includes? 



INTRODUCTION 5 

and dominates them all. In richness of nature, in scope and 
penetration of mind and vision, in all the potentialities of 
poetry, he is probably second among English poets to Shakes- 
peare alone. In art, in the power or the patience of working 
his native ore, he is surpassed by many; but few have ever 
held so rich a mine in fee. He has written more than any 
other English poet with the exception of Shakespeare, and he 
comes very near the gigantic total of Shakespeare. He has 
been publishing for more than half a century, and his career, 
happily for us, is not yet closed. His works are not a mere 
collection of poems, they are a literature. And his literature 
is the richest of modern times. If *' the best poetry is that 
w^hich reproduces the most of life," his place is among the great 
poets of the world. In the vast extent of his work he has 
dealt with or touched on nearly every phase and feature of 
humanity, and his scope is bounded only by the soul's limits 
and the last reaches of life. There are for him but two reali- 
ties and but two subjects, Life and Thought. On these are 
expended all his imagination and all his intellect, more con- 
sistently and in a higher degree than can be said of any Eng- 
lish poet since the age of Elizabeth. Life and thought, the 
dramatic and the metaphysical, are not considered apart, but 
woven into one seamless tissue; and in regard to both he has 
one point of view and one manner of treatment. It is this 
that causes the unity which subsists throughout his works, 
and it is this, too, which distinguishes him among poets, and 
makes that originality by virtue of which he has been described 
as the most striking figure in our poetic literature. 

Most poets endeavor to sink the individual in the universal; 
it is the special distinction of Mr. Browning that when he is 
most universal he is most individual. As a thinker he con- 
ceives of humanity not as an aggregate, but as a collection of 
units. Most thinkers write and speak of man; Mr. Browning 
of men. With man as a species, with man as a society, he 
does not concern himself, but with individual man and man. 
Every man is for him an epitome of the universe, a center of 
creation. Life exists for each as completely and separately 
as if he were the only inhabitant of our planet. 



6 INTRODUCTION 

Here is it that Mr. Browning parts company most decisively 
with all other poets who concern themselves exclusively with 
life — dramatic poets, as we call them; so that it seems almost 
necessary to invent some new term to define precisely his spe- 
cial attitude. And hence it is that in his drama thought plays 
comparatively so large, and action comparatively so small, a 
part; hence, that action is valued only in so far as it reveals 
thought or motive, not for its own sake, as the crown and 
flower of these. For his endeavor is not to set men in action 
for the pleasure of seeing them move; but to see and show, in 
their action and inaction alike, the real impulses of their being: 
to see how each soul conceives of itself. 

The dramatic poet, in the ordinary sense, in the sense in 
which we apply it to Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, aims 
at showing, by means of action, the development of charac- 
ter as it manifests itself to the world in deeds. His study is 
character, but it is character in action, considered only in con- 
nection wnth a particular grouping of events, and only so far 
as it produces or operates upon these. The processes are con- 
cealed from us, we see the result. We are told nothing, we 
care to know nothing, of what is going on in the thought; of 
the infinitely subtle meshes of motive or emotion which will 
perhaps find no direct outcome in speech, no direct manifesta- 
tion in action, but by which the soul's life in reality subsists. 

But is there no other sense in which a poet maybe dramatic, 
besides this sense of the acting drama? no new form possible, 
which 

'* peradventure may outgrow 
The simulation of the painted scene, 
Boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume, 
And take for a noble stage the soul itself, 
Its shifting fancies and celestial lights. 
With all its grand orchestral silences, 
To keep the pauses of the rhythmic sounds ? " * 

This new form of drama is the drama as we see it in Mr. 
Browning — a drama of the interior, a tragedy or comedy of 
the soul. Instead of a grouping of characters which shall act 

* Aurora LeigK Book Fifth. 



INTRODUCTION 7 

on one another to produce a certain result in action, we have 
a grouping of events useful or important only as they influ- 
ence the character or the mind. In this way, by making the 
soul the center of action, he is enabled (thinking himself into 
it, as all dramatists must do) to bring out its characteristics, 
to reveal its very nature. 

This, then, is Mr. Browning's consistent mental attitude, 
and his special method. But he has also a special instru- 
ment — the m.onologue. The drama of action demands a con- 
currence of several distinct personalities, influencing one 
another rapidl}^- by word or deed, so as to bring about the 
catastrophe; hence the propriety of the dialogue. But the 
introspective drama, in which the design is to represent and 
reveal the individual, requires a concentration of interest, a 
focusing of light on one point, to the exclusion or subordina- 
tion of surroundings; hence the propriety of the monologue, in 
which a single speaker or thinker can consciously or uncon- 
sciously exhibit his own soul. Nearly all the lyrics, romances, 
idyls — nearly all the miscellaneous poems, long and short — are 
monologues. 

The characteristic of which I have been speaking— the per- 
sistent care for the individual and personal, as distinguished 
from the universal and general — while it is the secret of his 
finest achievements, and rightly his special charm, is of all 
things the most alien to the ordinary conceptions of poetry, 
and the usual preferences for it. Compare, altogether apart 
from the worth and workmanship, one of Lord Tennyson's 
with one of Mr. Browning's best lyrics. The perfection of the 
former consists in the exquisite way in which it expresses 
feelings common to all. The perfection of the latter consists 
in the intensity of its expression of a single moment of passion 
or emotion; one peculiar to a single personality, and to that 
personality only at such a single moment. To appreciate it 
we must enter keenly and instantaneously into the imagi- 
nary character at its imagined crisis; and, even when this is 
easiest to do, it is evident that there must be more difficulty 
in doing it — for it requires a certain exertion — than in merely 
letting the mind lie at rest, accepting and absorbing. 



8 INTRODUCTION 

Allied to Mr. Browning's originality in temper, topic, man- 
ner of treatment, and special form, is his originality in style. 
His style is vital; his verse moves to the throbbing of an inner 
organism, not to the pulsations of a machine. He prefers, as 
indeed all true poets do, but more exclusively than any other 
poet, sense to sound, thought to expression. In his desire of 
condensation he employs as few words as are consistent with 
the right expression of his thought; he rejects superlative 
adjectives and all stop-gap words. He refuses to use words for 
words' sake; he declines to interrupt conversation with a dis- 
play of fireworks; and, as a result, it wnll be found that his 
finest effects of versification correspond with his highest 
achievements in imagination and passion. As a dramatic 
poet he is obliged to modulate and moderate, sometimes even 
to vulgarize, his style and diction for the proper expression of 
some particular character, in whose mouth exquisite turns of 
phrase and delicate felicities of rhythm would be inappropriate. 
He will not let himself go in the way of easy floridity, as 
writers may whose themes are more ** ideal." And where 
many writers would attempt merely to simplify and sweeten 
verse, he endeavors to give it fuller expressiveness, to give it 
strength and newness. It follows that Mr. Browning's verse 
is not so uniformly melodious as that of many other poets. 
But he is far, indeed, from paying no attention, or little, to 
meter and versification. In one very important matter, that 
of rhyme, he is perhaps the greatest master in our language; 
in single and double, in simple and grotesque alike, he suc- 
ceeds in fitting rhyme to rhyme wnth a perfection which I 
have never found in any other poet of any age. His lyrical 
poems contain more structural varieties of form than those of 
any preceding English poet, not excepting Shelley. His 
blank verse at its best is of higher quality — taking it for what 
it is, dramatic blank verse — than that of any modern poet. 
And both in rhymed and in blank verse he has written pas- 
sages which for almost every quality of verse are hardly to be 
surpassed in the language. 

That there is some excuse for the charge of " obscurity " so 
often brought against Mr. Browning, no one would or could 



INTRODUCTION 9 

deny. But it is only the excuse of a misconception. Mr. 
Browning is a thinker of extraordinary depth and subtlety; 
his themes are seldom superficial, often very remote, and his 
thought is, moreover, as swift as it is subtle. To a dull reader 
there is little difference between cloudy and fiery thought; the 
one is as much too bright for him as the other is too dense. 
Of all thinkers in poetry, Mr. Browning is the most swift and 
fiery. Moreover, while a writer who deals with easy themes 
has no excuse if he is not pellucid to a glance, one who em- 
ploys his intellect and imagination on high and hard ques- 
tions has a right to demand a corresponding closeness of 
attention. 

When Mr. Browning was a mere boy, it is recorded that he 
debated within himself w^iether he should not become a 
painter or a musician as w^ell as a poet. Finally, though not, 
I believe, for a good many years, he decided in the negative. 
But the latent qualities of painter and musician have devel- 
oped themselves in his poetry, and much of his finest and very 
much of his most original verse is that which speaks the lan- 
guage of painter and musician as it had never before been 
spoken. No English poet before him has ever excelled his 
utterances on music, none has so much as rivaled his utter- 
ances on art. In his poems on the sister arts of painting and 
sculpture — not in themselves more perfect in sympathy, 
though far greater in number, than those on music — he is 
simpl}^ the first to write of these arts as an artist might, if he 
could express his soul in words or rhythm. 

It is only natural that a poet with the instincts of a painter 
should be capable of superb landscape painting in verse; and 
w^e find in Mr. Browning this powder. It is further evident 
that such a poet — a man who has chosen poetry instead of 
painting — must consider the latter art subordinate to the for- 
mier, and it is only natural that we should find Mr. Browning 
subordinating the pictorial to the poetic capacity, and this 
more carefully than most other poets. His best landscapes 
are as brief as they are brilliant. They are as saber-strokes, 
swift, sudden, flashing the light from their sweep, and strik- 
ing straight to the heart. And they are never pushed into 



16 INTRODUCTION 

prominence for an effect of ideal beauty, nor strewn about in 
the way of thoughtful or passionate utterance, like roses in a 
runner's path. The}^ are subordinated always to the human 
interest; blended, /i^Si^d with it, so that a landscape in a poem 
of Mr. Browning's is literally a part of the emotion. 

Of all poets Mr. Browning is the healthiest and manliest. 
His genius is robust with vigorous blood, and his tone has 
the cheeriness of intellectual health. The most subtle of 
minds, his is the least sickly. The wind that blows in his 
pages is no hot or languorous breeze, laden with scents and . 
sweets, but a fresh salt wind blowing in from the sea. The 
keynote of his philosophy is: 

*' God's in his heaven, 
All's right with the world ! " 

He has such a hopefulness of belief in human nature that he 
shrinks from no man, however clothed and cloaked in evil, 
however miry with stumblings and fallings. This vivid 
hope and trust in man is bound up with a strong and strenu- 
ous faith in God. Mr. Browning's Christianity is wider than 
our creeds, and is all the more vitally Christian in that it 
never sinks into pietism. He is never didactic, but his faith is 
the root of his art, and transforms and transfigures it. Yet 
as a dramatic poet he is so impartial, and can express all 
creeds with so easy an interpretative accent, that it is possible 
to prove him (as Shakespeare has been proved) a believer in 
everything and a disbeliever in anything. 

Condejised f}'07n ""^ Introductio7i to Study of Browning^^ by Arthur 
Symons, 



CRITICAL OPINIONS 

I CAN have little doubt that my writing has been in the 
main too hard for many I should have been pleased to com- 
municate with; but I never designedly tried to puzzle people, 
as some of my critics have supposed. On the other hand, 
I never pretended to offer such literature as should be a sub- 
stitute for a cigar or a game at dominoes to an idle man. 
So, perhaps, on the whole I get my deserts and something 
over — not a crowd, but a few I value more. — Robert Browning 
to W. G. Kingsland. 

Browning, when, in poem or drama, he puts forth his 
peculiar power, when he writes with the motive which gives 
his work its singular value, is always dramatic. Whether he 
is so of purpose I shall not venture to say; but the seeming 
of his poetry is that it takes its shape from a necessity of his 
moral nature, not from deliberate intellectual preference. He 
never seems to be telling us what he thinks or feels; but he 
puts before us some man, — male or female, — whose indi- 
viduality soon becomes as clear and as absolute as our own; 
and that man pours his heart and soul out before us in words 
which are a part of him, utterly careless of what we think of 
the life whose hidden motives are thus laid bare to censure. 
The poet does not appear; indeed so wholly is he merged in 
the creature of his own will that, as we hear that creature 
speak, his creato'r is, for the time, quite forgotten. This is 
the perfection of dramatic power. It has been shown with 
this high absoluteness in English poetry by but two men, 
one of whom is Browning. — Richard Grant White. 

Man here on earth, according to the central and controlling 
thought of Mr. Browning, man here in a state of preparation 
for other lives, and surrounc'ed by wondrous spiritual influ- 
ences, is too great for the sphere that contains him, while, 



12 CRITICAL OPINONS. 

at the same time, he can exist only by submitting for the 
present to the conditions it imposes; never without fatal 
loss becoming content with submission, or regarding his 
present state as perfect or final. Our nature here is unfin- 
ished, imperfect, but its glory, its peculiarity, that wdiich 
makes us men — not God, and not brutes — lies precisely in 
this character of imperfection, giving scope as it does for 
indefinite grow^th and progress. 

*' Progress, man's distinctive mark alone, not God's, and 
not the beasts'; God is, they are, man partly is, and wholly 
hopes to be." . . . 

With Mr. Browning the moments are most glorious in 
which the obscure tendency of many years has been revealed 
by the lightning of sudden passion, or in which a resolution 
that changes the current of life has been taken in reliance 
upon that insight which vivid emotion bestows; and those 
periods of our history are charged most fully with moral 
purpose which take their direction from moments such as 
these. — Edward Dozvden. 

If there is any great quality more perceptible than another 
in Mr. Browning's intellect, it is his decisive and incisive 
faculty of thought, his sureness and intensity of perception, 
his rapid and trenchant resolution of aim. To charge him 
with obscurity is about as accurate as to call Lynceus pur- 
blind, or complain of the sluggish action of the telegraphic 
wire. He is something too much the reverse of obscure; 
he is too brilliant and subtle for the ready reader of a ready 
writer to follow with any certainty the track of intelligence 
which moves wnth such incessant rapidity. . . The very 
essence of Mr. Browning's aim and method, as exhibited in 
the ripest fruits of his intelligence, is such as implies above 
all other things the possession of a quality the very reverse 
of obscurity — a faculty of spiritual illumination rapid and in- 
tense and subtle as lightning, which brings to bear upon its 
central object by way of direct and vivid illustration every 
symbol and detail on which its light is flashed in passing.— 
A. C. Swinburne. 



SAUL AND OTHER POEMS 



Saul- 



Said Abner, ''At last thou art come! Ere I tell, ere thou 

speak, 
Kiss my cheek, wish m^e well! " Then I wished it, and did 

kiss his cheek. 
And he, '' Since the king, O my friend, for thy countenance 

sent. 
Neither drunken nor eaten have we; nor until from his tent 
Thou return with the joyful assurance the King liveth yet, 
Shall our lip with the honey be bright, with the water be 

wet. 6 

For out of the black mid-tent's silence, a space of three days, 
Not a sound hath escaped to thy servants, of prayer nor of 

praise, 

* The first nine sections of Said were printed in the seventh number of Beils and 
Pomegranates in 1845. The concluding stanzas were written in the winter of 
1853-54, and the poem as enlarged was published in Men and IVomen, 1855. 

The poem is based on i Sam. xvi. 14-23, where Saul is roused to consciousness 
and sanity by the music of David. This music is represented as " having three 
series of rising motives : first, tunes used to the brutes, sheep, quail, crickets, jer- 
boa ; second, the help-tunes of great epochs in human life, — reapers, burial, mar- 
riage, soldiers, priests ; third, the songs of human aspirations, wild joys of living, 
fame crowning ambition and noble deeds, praise of unborn generations, the 
next world's reward and repose,'' but it is not until the culmination, the assurance 
of the God-love, which is the Christ, that the king is roused from his lethargy. 
*''' Saul is a magnificent interpretation of the old theme, a favorite with the mys- 
trcs, that evil spirits are driven out by music. But in this interpretation it is not 
the mere tones, the thrumming on the harp, it is the religious movement of the 
intelligence, it is the truth of Divine love throbbing in every chord, which consti- 
tutes the spell." — Corson. 

I. Abner. A Jewish general, Saul's cousin and friend. 



14 SAUL 

To betoken that Saul and the Spirit have ended their strife, 

And that, faint in his triumph, the monarch sinks back upon 

life. 10 

II 

*' Yet now my heart leaps, O beloved! God's child with his 

dew 
On thy gracious gold hair, and those lilies still living and 

blue 
Just broken to twine round thy harp-strings, as if no wild 

heat 
Were now raging to torture the desert!" 

Ill 

Then I, as was meet, 
Knelt down to the God of my fathers, and rose on my feet 
And ran o'er the sand burnt to powder. The tent was 

unlooped; i^ 

I pulled up the spear that obstructed, and under I stooped; 
Hands and knees on the slippery grass-patch, all withered 

and gone, 
That extends to the second inclosure, I groped my way on 
Till I felt where the foldskirts fly open. Then once more 

I prayed, 20 

And opened the foldskirts and entered,, and was not afraid 
But spoke, ''Here is David, thy servant!" And no voice 

replied. 
At the first I saw naught but the blackness; but soon I 

descried 
A something more black than the blackness— the vast, the 

upright 
Main prop which sustains the pavilion: and slow into sight 
Grew a figure against it, gigantic and blackest of all. 26 

Then a sunbeam, that burst thro' the tent ro of, showed Saul . 

9. Spirit. Melancholy and insanity were anciently attributed to evil spirits, 
which took possession of the afflicted persons* 



SAUL 15 

IV 

He stood as erect as that tent-prop, both arms stretched out 

wide 
On the great cross-support in the center, that goes to each 

side; 
He relaxed not a muscle, but hung there as, caught in his 

pangs 30 

And waiting his change, the king serpent all heavily hangs, 
Far away from his kind, in the pine, till deliverance come 
With the spring-time, — so agonized Saul, drear and stark, 

blind and dumb. 



Then I tuned my harp, — took off the lilies we twine round 
its chords 

Lest they snap 'neath the stress of the noontide — those sun- 
beams like swords ! 35 

.A„nd I first played the tune all our sheep know, as, one after 
one, 

So docile they come to the pen-door till folding be done. 

They are white and untorn by the bushes, for lo, they have 
fed 

Where the long grasses stifle the water within the stream's ' 
bed; 

And now one after one seeks its lodging, as star follows 
star ' 40 

Into eve and the blue far above us, — so blue and so far! 

VI 

— Then the tune, for which quails on the cornland will each 

leave his mate 
To fly after the player; then, what makes the crickets elate 
Till for boldness they fight one another: and then, what has 

weight 

33. Drear (AS. dreorig^ sad). Dreary, cheerless. Stark (AS. Stearcy stiff). 
Rigidi 



l6 SAUL 

To set the quick jerboa a-musing outside his sand house — ■ 
There are none such as he for a wonder, half bird and half 

mouse ! 46 

God made all the creatures and gave them our love and our 

fear, 
To give sign, we and they are his children, one family here. 

VII 

Then I played the help-tune of our reapers, their wine-song, 

when hand 
Grasps at hand, eye lights eye in good friendship, and great 

hearts expand 50 

And grow one in the sense of this world's life. — And then, the 

last song 
When the dead man is praised on his journey — " Bear him 

along 
With his few faults shut up like dead flowerets! Are balm- 
seeds not here 
To console us? The land has none left such as he on the 

bier. 
Oh, would we might keep thee, my brother! " — And then, 

the glad chant 55 

Of the marriage, — first go the young maidens, next, she 

whom we vaunt 
As the beauty, the pride of our dwelling. — And then, the 

great march 
Wherein man runs to man to assist him and buttress an arch 
Naught can break; who shall harm them, our friends? — Then, 

the chorus intoned 
As the Levites go up to the altar in glory enthroned. 60 
But I stopped here: for here in the darkness Saul groaned. 

VIII 

And I paused, held my breath in such silence, and listened 

apart; 
And the tent shook, for mighty Saul shuddered: and sparkles 

'gan dart 

45, Jerboa. An Old-World rodent animal, remarkable for .swift flying Icapsi 



SAUL 17 

From the jewels that woke in his turban, at once with a start 
All its lordly male-sapphires, and rubies courageous at heart. 
So the head: but the body still moved not, still hung there 
erect. . C6 

And I bent once again to my playing, pursued it unchecked, 
As I sang, — 

IX 

" Oh, our manhood's prime vigor! No spirit 

feels waste. 
Not a muscle is stopped in its playing nor sinew unbraced. 
Oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to 

rock, 70 

The strong rending of boughs from the fir tree, the cool 

silver shock 
Of the plunge in a pool's living water, the hunt of the bear. 
And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair. 
And the meal, the rich dates yellowed over with gold dust 

divine. 
And the locust-flesh steeped in the pitcher, the full draught 

of wine, 75 

And the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell 
That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well. 
How good is man's life, the mere living! how fit to employ 
All the heart and the soul and the senses for ever in joy! 
Hast thou loved the white locks of thy father, whose sword 

thou didst guard 80 

When he trusted thee forth with the armies, for glorious 

reward? 
Didst thou see the thin hands of thy mother, held up as men 

sung 
The low song of the nearly departed, and hear her faint 

tongue 

6$. Male-sapphire. The ancient sapphire was the same as our lapis lazuli. 
75. Locust-flesh. Sometimes used in Oriental countries for food. 
78. How good is man's life, the mere living. This strikes the keynote of 
the whole stanza. 



l8 SAUL 

Joining in while it could to the witness, ' Let one more 

attest, 
I have lived, seen God's hand thro' a lifetime, and all was for 

best!' 85 

Then they sung thro' their tears in strong triumph, not much. 

but the rest. 
And thy brothers, the help and the contest, the working 

whence grew 
Such result as, from seething grape-bundles, the spirit 

strained true: 
And the friends of thy boyhood — that boyhood of wonder 

and hope, 
Present promise and wealth of the future beyond the eye's 

scope, — 90 

Till lo, thou art grown to a monarch; a people is thine: 
And all gifts, which the world offers singly, on one head 

combine! 
On one head, all the beauty and strength, love and rage 

(like the throe 
That, a-work in the rock, helps its labor and lets the gold 

go), 
High ambition and deeds which surpass it, fame crowning 
them, — all 95 

Brought to blaze on the head of one creature— King Saul! " 

X 

And lo, with that leap of my spirit,— heart, hand, harp, and 

voice. 
Each lifting Saul's name out of sorrow, each bidding rejoice 
Saul's fame in the light it was made for — as when, dare I say. 
The Lord's army, in rapture of service, strains thro' its 

array, 100 

87. Sympathy and rivalry may exist at the same time between brothers. 

93. Throe (Scot, thraiu). Pain, agony. 

96. In the edition of 1845 the last four lines of this section read thus : 
" On one head the joy and the pride, even rage like the throe 
That opes the rock, helps its glad labor, and lets the gold go— 
And ambition that sees a man lead it — oh, all of these— all 
Combine to unite in one creature — Saul," 



SAUL 



19 



And upsoareth the cherubim-chariot — ''Saul!** cWed I, and 

stopped, 
And waited the thing that should follow. Then Saul, who 

. hung propped 
By the tent's cross-support in the center, was struck by his 

name. 
Have ye seen when Springes arrowy summons goes right to 

the aim, 
And some mountain, the last to withstand her, that held (he 

alone, 105 

While the vale laughed in freedom and flowers) on a broad 

bust of stone 
A year's snow bound about for a breastplate, — leaves grasp 

of the sheet? 
Fold on fold all at once it crowds thunderously down to his 

feet. 
And there fronts you, stark, black, but alive yet, your moun- 
tain of old. 
With his rents, the successive bequeathings of ages untold: 
Yea, each harm got in fighting your battles, each furrow and 

scar III 

Of his head thrust 'twixt you and the tempest— all hail, there 

they are! 
—Now again to be softened with verdure, again hold the 

nest 
Of the dove, tempt the goat and its young to the green on his 

crest 
For their food in the ardors of summer. One long shudder 

thrilled 115 

All the tent till the very air tingled, then sank and was stilled 
At the King's self left standing before me, released and aware. 
What was gone, what remained? All to traverse 'twixt hope 

and despair. 



101. Cherubim (Heb. k'rubJt). Angelic beings excelling in knowledge, next 
in rank to seraphim. 

118. David's music had served Saul an ill turn had it only roused him from leth- 
argy to despair. 



20 SAUL 

Death was past, life not come: so he waited. Awhile his 

right hand 
Held the brow, helped the eyes left too vacant, forthwith 

to remand ^^^ 

To their place what new objects should enter: 'twas Saul as 

before. 
I looked up, and dared gaze at those eyes, nor was hurt any 

more 
Than by slow pallid sunsets in autumn, ye watch from the 

shore. 
At their sad level gaze o'er the ocean— a sun's slow dechne 
Over hills which, resolved in stern silence, o'erlap and 

entwine ^'^^ 

Base with base to knit strength more intensely: so, arm 

folded arm 
O'er the chest whose slow heavings subsided. 

XI 

What spell or what charm, 
(For, awhile there was trouble within me) what next should 

I urge 
To sustain him where song had restored him? Song filled 

to the verge 
His cup with the wine of this life, pressing all that it yields 
Of mere fruitage, the strength and the beauty: beyond, on 

what fields, ^^^ 

Glean a vintage more potent and perfect to brighten the eye. 
And bring blood to the lip, and commend them the cup they 

put by? 
He saith, " It is good"; still he drinks not: he lets me praise 

life. 
Gives assent, yet would die for his own part. 

XII 

Then fancies grew rife 
Which had come long ago on the pasture, when round me 
the sheep ^^ 



SAUL 21 

Fed in silence — above, the one eagle wheeled slow as in sleep; 
And I lay in my hollow and mused on the world that might 

lie 
'Neath his ken, tho' I saw but the strip 'twixt the hill and 

the sky: 
And I laughed — " Since my days are ordained to be passed 

with my flocks, 140 

Let me people at least, with my fancies, the plains and the 

rocks. 
Dream the life I am never to mix with, and image the 

show 
Of mankind as they live in those fashions I hardly shall 

knowM 
Schemes of life, its best rules and right uses, the courage 

that gains, 
And the prudence that keeps what men strive for!" And 

now these old trains I45 

Of vague thought came again; I grew surer; so, once more 

the string 
Of my harp made response to my spirit, as thus — 

XIII 

" Yea, my King," 
i began— ''thou dost well in rejecting mere comforts that 

spring 
From t\\e mere mortal life held in common by man and by 

brute: 
In our flesh grows the branch of this life, in our soul it 

bears fruit. ^50 

Thou hast marked the slow rise of the tree,— how its stem 

trembled first 
Till it passed the kid's lip, the stag's antler; then safely 

outburst 
The fan-branches all round; and thou mindest when these 

too, in turn 
Broke a-bloom and the palm-tree seemed perfect: yet more 

was to learn, 



22 SAUL 

E'en the good that comes in with the palm-fruit. Our dates 
shall we slight, 155 

When their juice brings a cure for all sorrow? or care for 
the plight 

Of the palm's self whose slow growth produced them? Not 
so! stem and branch 

Shall decay, nor be known in their place, while the palm- 
wine shall stanch 

Every wound of man's spirit in winter. I pour thee such 
wine. 

Leave the flesh to the fate it was fit for! the spirit be thine! 

By the spirit, when age shall o'ercome thee, thou still shalt 
enjoy 161 

More indeed, than at first when, inconscious, the life of a 
boy. 

Crush that life, and behold its wine running! Each deed 
thou hast done 

Dies, revives, goes to work in the world; until e'en as the 
sun 

Looking down on the earth, tho' clouds spoil him, tho' tem- 
pests efface, 165 

Can find nothing his own deed produced not, must every- 
where trace 

The results of his past summer-prime, — so, each ray of thy 
will. 

Every flash of thy passion and prowess, long over, shall thrill 

Thy whole people, the countless, with ardor, t^U they too 
give forth 

A like cheer to their sons: who in turn, fill the South and the 
North 170 

With the radiance thy deed was the germ of. Carouse in 
the past! 

But the license of age has its limit; thou diest at last. 

As the lion when age dims his eyeball, the rose at her height. 

So with man — so his power and his beauty for ever take 
flight. 

No! Again a long draught of my soul-wine! Look forth 
o'er the years! 175 



SAUL 23 

Thou hast done now with eyes for the actual; begin with the 

seer's! 
Is Saul dead? In the depth of the vale make his tomb- 
bid arise 
A gray mountain of marble heaped four-square, till, built to 

the skies, 
Let it mark where the great First King slumbers: whose 

famxe would ye know? 
Up above see the rock's naked face, where the record shall 

go 180 

In great characters cut by the scribe, — Such was Saul, so he 

did; 
With the sages directing the work, by the populace chid, — 
For not half, they'll affirm, is comprised there! Which fault 

to amend. 
In the grove with his kind grows the cedar, whereon they 

shall spend 
(See, in tablets 'tis level before them) their praise, and 

record 185 

With the gold of the graver, Saul's story, — the statesman's 

great word 
Side by side with the poet's sweet comment. The river's 

a-wave 
With smooth papcr-reeds grazing each other when prophet- 
winds rave: 
So the pen gives unborn generations their due and their 

part 
In thy being! Then, first of the mighty, thank God that 

thou art! " 190 



XIV 

And behold while I sang . . . but O Thou who didst grant 

me that day, 
And before it not seldom has granted thy help to essay, 

179. First King. Cf, i Sam. lo. 

191-205. David pauses in his narration, which he resumes in the next section. 



24 SAUL 

Carry on and complete an adventure, — my shield and my 

sword 
In that act where my soul was thy servant, thy word was my 

word, — 
Still be with me, who then at the summit of human endeavor 
And scaling the highest, man's thought could, gazed hope- 
less as ever 196 
On the new stretch of heaven above me — till, mighty to 

save, 
Just one lift of thy hand cleared that distance — God's throne 

from man's grave! 
Let me -tell out my tale to its ending — my voice to my heart 
Which can scarce dare believe in whai marvels last night I 

took part, 200 

As this morning I gather the fragments, alone with my sheep, 
And still fear lest the terrible glory evanish like sleep! 
For I wake in the gray dewy covert, wdiile Hebron upheaves 
The dawm struggling with night on his shoulder, and Kid- 

ron retrieves 
Slow the damage of yesterday's sunshine. 

XV 

I say then, — my song 
While I sang thus, assuring the monarch, and, ever more 

strong, 206 

Alade a proffer of good'to console him, — he slowly resumed 
His old motions and habitudes kingly. The right hand 

replumed 
His black locks to their w^onted composure, adjusted the 

swathes 
Of his turban, and see — the huge sweat that his countenance 

bathes, 210 

He wipes off the robe; and he girds now his loins as of yore. 



202. Evanish. A poetical form of vanish. 

203. Hebron. A town sixteen miles southwest of Jerusalem. 

204. Kidron, Kedron, a winter brook in a ravine east of Jerusalem. 



SAUL 



25 



And feels slow for the armlets of price, with the clasp set 

before. 
He is Saul, ye remember in glory, — ere error had bent 
The broad brow from the daily communion; and still, tho' 

much spent 
Be the life and the bearing that front you, the same, God 

did choose, 215 

To receive what a man may waste, desecrate, never quite 

lose. 
So sank he along by the tent-prop, till, stayed by the pile 
Of his armor and war-cloak and garments, he leaned there 

awhile. 
And sat out my singing, — one arm round the tent-prop, to 

raise 
His bent head, and the other hung slack — till I touched on 

the praise 220 

I foresaw from all men in all time, to the man patient there; 
And thus ended, the harp falling forward. Then first I was 

'ware 
That he sat, as I say, with my head just above his vast knees 
Which were thrust out on each side around me, like oak 

roots which please 
To encircle a lamb when it slumbers. I looked up to know 
If the best I could do had brought solace: he spoke not, but 

slow 226 

Lifted up the hand slack at his side, till he laid it with care 
Soft and grave, but in mild settled will, on my brow: thro' 

my hair 
The large fingers were pushed, and he bent back my head, 

with kind power — 

All my face back, intent to peruse it, as men do a flower. 

Thus held he me there with his great eyes that scrutinized 

mine — 231 

And oh, all my heart how it loved him! but where was the 

sign? 
I yearned — '' Could I help thee, my father, inventing a bliss, 
I would add, to that life of the past, both the future and this; 



26 SAUL 

I would give thee new life altogether, as good, ages hence, 
As this moment,— had love but the warrant, love's heart to 
dispense! " 236 

XVI 

Then the truth came upon me. No harp more— no song 
more! outbroke — 



XVII 

"I have gone the whole round of creation: I saw and I 

spoke; 
I, a work of God's hand for that purpose, received in my 

brain 
And pronounced on the rest of his handwork— returned 

him again 240 

His creation's approval or censure: I spoke as I saw. 
Reported, as man may of God's work— all's love,, yet all's 

law. 
Now I lay down the judgeship he lent me. Each faculty 

tasked 
To perceive him has gained an abyss, where a dewdrop was 

asked. 
Have I knowledge? confounded it shrivels at Wisdom laid 

bare. ^45 

Have I forethought? how purblind, how blank, to the In- 
finite Care! 
Do I task any faculty highest, to image success? 
I but open my eyes, — and perfection, no more and no less, 
In the kind I imagined, full-fronts me, and God is seen God 
In the star, in the stone, in the fiesh, in the soul and the 

clod. 250 



237. Harp and song have served their turn, and David puts them aside for 
inspired speech. *' The truth " bursts on him. Would he save Saul ? Why, so 
would God. He cannot? But God can. And so by his human love and sym- 
pathy he realizes the divine, and prophesies the Christ. It is a tremendous infer- 
ence, but nothing less is possible unless the creature's love is to excel the Creator's. 

246. Purblind (pure + blind). First, totally blind ; then, dim of vision. 



SAUL 27 

And thus looking within and around me, I ever renew 
(With that stoop of the soul which in bending upraises it 

too) 
The submission of man's nothing-perfect to God's all-com- 
plete, 
As by each new obeisance in spirit, I climb to his feet. 
Yet with all this abounding experience, this deity known, 
I shall dare to discover some province, some gift of my 
own. 256 

There's a faculty pleasant to exercise, hard to hoodwink, 
I am fain to keep still in abeyance (I laugh as I think), 
Lest, insisting to claim and parade in it, wot ye, I worst 
E'en the Giver in one gift. — Behold, I could love if I durst! 
But I sink the pretension as fearing a man may o'ertake 
God's own speed in the one way of love: I abstain for love's 

sake. 
—What, my soul? see thus far and no farther? when doors 

great and small, 
Nine-and-ninety flew ope at our touch, should the hun- 
dredth appall? 
In the least things have faith, yet distrust in the greatest of 
all? 265 

Do I find love so full in my nature, God's ultimate gift. 
That I doubt his own love can compete with it? Here, the 

parts shift? 
Here, the creature surpass the creator,— the end, what 

began? 

Would I fain in my impotent yearning do all for this man, 

And dare doubt he alone shall not help him, who yet alone 

can? 270 

Would it ever have entered my mind, the bare will, much 

less power, 
To bestow on this Saul what I sang of, the marvelous dower 
Of the life he was gifted and filled with? to make such a 

soul. 
Such a body, and then such an earth for insphering the 
whole ? 



28 SAUL 

And doth it not enter my mind (as my warm tears attest), 
These good things being given, to go on, and give one 

more, the best? 276 

Aye, to save and redeem and restore him, maintain at the 

height 
This perfection, — succeed, with Hfe's dayspring, death's min- 
ute of night? 
Interpose at the difificult minute, snatch Saul the mistake, 
Sa-ul the failure, the ruin he seems now, — and bid him awake 
From the dream, the probation, the prelude, to find himself 

set 281 

Clear and safe in new light and new life, — a new harmony yet 
To be run and continued, and ended — who knows? — or 

endure! 
The man taught enough by life's dream, of the rest to make 

sure; 
By the pain-tiirob, triumphantly wanning intensified bliss. 
And the next world's reward and repose, by the struggles in 

this. 286 

XVIII 

''I believe it! 'Tis thou, God, that givest, 'tis I wdio 

receive: 
In the first is the last, in thy will is my power to believe. 
All's one gift: thou canst grant it moreover, as prompt to my 

prayer, 
As I breathe out this breath, as I open these arms to the 

air. 290 

From thy will stream the worlds, life and nature, thy dread 

Sabaoth: 
/ will? — the mere atoms despise me! Why am I not loath 
To look that, even that in the face too? Why is it I dare 
Think but lightly of such impuissance? What stops my 

despair? 

2gi. Sabaoth (Gr. from Heb. isebaotJi). Armies, hosts ; used chiefly in the 
phrase Lord God of Sabaoth. 
294. Impuissance. Want of power, inability. 



SAUL • 29 

This; — 'tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what 

man Would do! 295 

See the King — I would help him, but cannot, the wishes fall 

through. 
Could I wrestle to raise him from sorrow, grow poor to 

enrich, 
To fill up his life, starve my own out, I would — knowing 

which, 
I know that my service is perfect. Oh, speak thro' me now! 
Would I suffer for him that I love? So wouldst thou— so 

wilt thou! 300 

So shall crown thee the topmost, inefifablest, uttermost 

crown — 
And thy love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave up nor down 
One spot for the creature to stand in! It is by no breath, 
Turn of eye, wave of hand, that salvation joins issue with 

death ! 304 

As thy love is discovered almighty, almighty be proved 
Thy power, that exists with and for it, of being Beloved! 
He who did most, shall bear most; the strongest shall stand 

the most weak. 
'Tis the weakness in strength, that I cry for! my fTesh, that 

I seek 
In the Godhead! I seek and I find it. O Saul, it shall be 
A Face like my face that receives thee: a Man like to me. 
Thou shalt love and be loved by, for ever: a Hand like this 

hand 311 

Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the 

Christ stand!" 

XIX 

I know not too well how I found my way home in the night. 
There were witnesses, cohorts about me, to left and to right, 
Angels, powers, the unuttered, unseen, the alive, the aware: 
I repressed, I got thro' them as hardly, as strugglingly there, 

295. Cf. Rabbi Ben Ezra. 

" What I aspired to be 
iVndwas not, comforts me." 



30 



SAUL 



As a runner beset by the populace famished for news — 

Life or death. The whole earth was awakened, hell loosed 
with her crews; 

And the stars of night beat with emotion, and tingled and 
shot 

Out in fire the strong pain of pent knowledge: but I fainted 
not, 320 

For the Hand still impelled me at once and supported, sup- 
pressed 

All the tumult, and quenched it with quiet, and holy behest, 

Till the rapture was shut in itself, and the earth sank to rest. 

Anon at the dawn, all that trouble had withered from earth- 
Not so much, but I saw it die out in the day's tender birth; 

In the gathered intensity brought to the gray of the hills; 

In the shuddering forests' held breath; in the sudden wind- 
thrills; Z^l 

In the startled wild beasts that bore ofT, each with eye sid- 
ling still, 

Tho' averted with wonder and dread; in the birds stiff and 
chill 

That rose heavily as I approached them, made stupid with 
awe : ZZ^ 

E'en the serpent that slid away silent— he felt the new law. 

The same stared in the white humid faces upturned by the 
flowers; 

The same worked in the heart of the cedar and moved the 
vine bowers: 

And the little brooks witnessing murmured, persistent and 
low. 

With their obstinate, all but hushed voices—" E'en so, it 
is so! " 335 

318-335. " Mr. Browning's most characteristic feeling for nature appears in his 
rendering of those aspects of sky, or earth, or sea, of sunset, or noonday, or dawn, 
which seem to acquire some sudden passionate significance ; which seem to be 
charged with some spiritual secret eager for disclosure ; in his rendering of those 
moments which betray the passion at the heart of things, which thrill and tingle 
with prophetic fire . . . when to David the stars shoot out the pain of pent 
knowledge and in the gray of the hills at morning there dwells a gathered inten- 



HERVE RIEL 3I 



Herve Riel * 



On the se^ and at the Hogue, sixteen hundred ninety-two, 
Did the English fight the French, — woe to France! 

And, the thirty-first of Llay, helter-skelter thro' the blue. 

Like a crowd of frightened porpoises a shoal of sharks 
pursue. 
Came crowding ship on ship to St. Malo on the Ranee, 5 

With the English fleet in view. 

II 

'Twas the squadron that escaped, with the victor in full 
chase; 
First and foremost of the drove, in his great ship, Dam- 
freville; 

sity, — then nature rises from her sweet ways of use and wont, and shows herself 
the Priestess, the Pythoness, the Divinitj'' which she is. Or rather, through 
nature, the spirit of God addresses itself to the spirit of man." — Dowden. 

*It is noticeable that of Browning's two grand ballads — Herve Riel and Ho%u 
They Brought the Good News froDi Ghefit to Aix — neither has an English in- 
spiration. Herve Riel records the heroism of a Breton sailor who guided the 
French squadron retreating from La Hogue, through the shallows of the river 
Ranee, to a safe harborage. Browning follows history, except in one point which 
he overlooked— that Herve Riel claimed holiday for life, instead of for one day. 

The battle of La Hogue was fought May iq, i6g2, in the war begun by Louis 
XIV. of France to secure his succession to the Palatinate. Other powers formed a 
" Grand Alliance" against him, and at La Hogue, between the peninsula of La 
INIanche and the Isle of Wight, the French fleet was defeated by the English and 
Dutch fleet, commanded by Admiral Russell. This victory transferred naval 
supremacy from France to England and Holland. Some^ of the French ships 
which retreated to Cherbourg were taken ; how others escaped. Browning here 
tells us. 

This poem was first printed in the Cornhill Magazine^ March, 1871. The hun- 
dred pounds which Browning received for it was given to a fund for the relief of 
Paris, then suffering from the Franco-German war. 

5. St. Malo, on the river Ranee, and La Hogue are on the north coast of Nor- 
mandy. 

8, Damfreville was the commander of the largest French ship. 



32 HERVE RIEL 

Close on him fled, great and small, 

Twenty-two good ships in all; lO 

And they signaled to the place 
'* Help the winners of a race! 

Get us guidance, give us harbor, take us quick — or, quicker 

still, 
Here's the English can and will!" 



Then the pilots of the place put out brisk and leapt on bo^rd; 

*' Why, what hope or chance have ships like these to 

pass?" laughed they: i6 

'' Rocks to starboard, rocks to port, all the passage scarred 

and scored. 
Shall the Formidable here with her twelve and eighty guns 

Think to make the river-mouth by the single narrow w^ay^ 
Trust to enter where 'tis ticklish for a craft of twenty tons, 
And with flow at full beSide? 21 

Now 'tis slackest ebb of tide. 
Reach the mooring? Rather say, 
While rock stands or water runs. 
Not a ship will leave the bay! " 25 

IV 

Then was called a council straight. 

Brief and bitter the debate: 

*' Here's the English at our heels; would you have them take 

in tow 
All that's left us of the fleet, linked together stern and bow. 
For a prize to Plymouth Sound? 30 

Better run the ships aground! " 
(Ended Damfreville his speech.) 

18. Twelve and Eighty. A literal translation of the French quaire-vingt- 
douze. 
30. Plymouth. One of the chief British naval stations. 



HERVE KIEL 



33 



Not a minute more to wait! 

" Let the Captains all and each 

Shove ashore, then blow up, burn the vessels on the beach! 
France must undergoe her fate. 30 



''Give the word!" But no such word 
Was ever spoke or heard; 

For up stood, for out stepped, for in struck amid all these 
—A Captain? A Lieutenant? A mate— first, second, third? 

No such man of mark, and meet 41 

With his betters to compete! 

But a simple Breton sailor pressed by Tourville for the 
fleet, 
A poor coasting-pilot he, Herve Riel the Croisickese. 



VI 

And, '' What mockery or malice have we here? " cries Herve 

^''^'' 45 

" Are you mad, you jMalouins? Are you cowards, fools, or 
rogues? 
Talk to me of rocks and shoals, me who took the soundings, 

tell 
On my fingers every bank, every shallow, every swell 
Twixt the offing here and Greve where the river dis- 
embogues? 
Are you bought by English gold? Is it love the lying's for? 
Morn and eve, night and day, 51 

Have I piloted your bay. 



43. Tourville. The French admiral. 

44. Croisickese. An inhabitant of Le Croi.sic. Le Croisic, the home of Herve 
Riel, is a small fishing village on the south coast of Brittany. 

46. Malouins. People of St. Ma-Io. 

49- Greve. The sands around Mont St. INIichel. Disembogues (Sp. disem- 
hoca). Empties. 



34 HERVE KIEL 

Entered free and anchored fast at the foot of Solidor. 
Burn the fleet and ruin France? That were worse than 
fifty Hogues! 
Sirs, they know I speak the truth! Sirs, believe me 
there's a way! 55 

Only let me lead the line. 
Have the biggest ship to steer, 
Get this Formidable clear, 
^Make the others follow mine, 

And I lead them, most and least, by a passage I know well, 
Right to Solidor past Greve, 61 

And there lay them safe and sound; 
And if one ship misbehave, 
— Keel so much as grate the ground. 
Why, I've nothing but my life, — here's my head! " cries 
Herve Riel. 6^ 

VII 

Not a minute more to wait. 

" Steer us in, then, small and great! 

Take the helm, lead the line, save the squadron! " cried its 
chief. 
Captains, give the sailor place! 

He is Admiral, in brief. 70 

Still the north-wind, by God's grace! 
See the noble fellow's face 
As the big ship, with a bound. 
Clears the entry like a hound. 
Keeps the passage as its inch of way were the wide sea's 

profound! 75 

See, safe thro' shoal and rock, 

How they follow in a flock. 
Not a ship that misbehaves, not a keel that grates the ground. 

Not a spar that comes to grief! 

The peril, see, is past, 80 

All are harbored to the last, 

f,.^ — ^_ . - — i 

jf$^> Solidor. A fortified place on the French mainland. 



HERVE RIEL 



35 



And just as Herve Kiel hollas ''Anchor!*' — sure as fate 
Up the English come, too late! 

VIII 

So, the storm subsides to calm: 

They see the green trees wave 85 

On the heights overlooking Greve. 
Hearts that bled are stanched with balm. 
*' Just our rapture to enhance, 

Let the English rake the bay. 
Gnash their teeth and glare askance 90 

As they cannonade away! 
'Neath rampired Solidor pleasant riding on the Ranee! " 
How hope succeeds despair on each Captain's countenance! 
Out burst all with one accord, 

"This is Paradise for Hell! 95 

Let France, let France's King 
Thank the man that did the thing! " 
What a shout, and all one word, 

"Herve Kiel!" 
As he stepped in front once more, 100 

Not a symptom of surprise 

In the frank blue Breton eyes, 
Just the same man as before. 

IX 

Then said Damfreville, " My friend, 

I must speak out at the end, 10$ 

Tho' I find the speaking hard. 
Praise is deeper than the lips: 
You have saved the King his ships. 

You must name your own reward. 
'Faith our sun was near eclipse! lio 

89. The bay. Of St. Michel. 

92. Rampiredr An archaic form of *' ramparted" ; fortified. 



36 HERVE KIEL 

Demand whate'er you will, 
France remains your debtor still. 

Ask to heart's content and have! or my name's not Dam- 
freville." 



Then a beam of fun outbroke 

On the bearded mouth that spoke, 115 

As the honest heart laughed through 

Those frank eyes of Breton blue: 

** Since I needs must say my say, 

Since on board the duty's done, 

And from Malo Roads to Croisic Point, what is it but a 
run?— 120 

Since 'tis ask and have, I may — 

Since the others go ashore — 
Come! A good whole holiday! 

Leave to go and see my wife, whom I call the Belle 
Aurore! " 
That he asked and that he got, — nothing more. 125 

XI 

Name and deed alike are lost: 
Not a pillar nor a post 

In his Croisic keeps alive the feat as it befell; 
Not a head in white and black 

On a single fishing smack, 130 

In memory of the man but for whom had gone to wrack 

All that France saved from the fight whence England bore 
the bell. 
Go to Paris: rank on rank 

Search the heroes flung pell-mell 
On the Louvre, face and flank! I35 

You shall look long enough ere you come to Herve Riel. 

131. Wrack CD. lurak^ wrack). Ruin, destruction. 

132. Bore the bell. Won the victory. 

134. The heroes . . . Louvre. The heroes whose pictures are in the Louvre, 
the great art gallery of Paris. 



PHEIDIPPIDES 37 

So, for better and for worse, 
Herve Riel, accept my verse! 
In my verse, Herve Riel, do thou once more 
Save the squadron, honor France, love thy wife the Belle 
Aurore! 140 



Pheidippides * 

First I salute this soil of the blessed, river and rock! 
Gods of my birthplace, daemons and heroes, honor to all! 
Then I name thee, claim thee for our patron, co-equal in 

praise 
—Ay, with Zeus the Defender, with Her of the segis and 

spear! 4 

* This poem was published in Dramatic Idyls in 1879. " The story stands out 
with something of the joyful pride of a Greek statue among its Gothic associates." 

In 4qo B. c. the Persians, having razed Eretria, invaded Attica, and camped on 
the plain of Marathon. The Athenian army assembled and its generals sent a 
trained runner, Philippides or Pheidippides, to ask Lacedaemonian aid. He trav- 
ersed the one hundred and forty miles between Athens and Sparta in forty-eight 
hours, and found the Spartans, who were celebrating their great national festival 
of the Carneia, backward from superstition or jealousy in joining their forces with 
the Athenians. 

*' And as to Pan, they say that Philippides (who was sent as a messenger to 
Lacedsemon when the Persians landed) reported that the Lacedaemonians 
were deferring their march : for it was their custom not to go out on a campaign 
till the moon was at its full. But he said that he had met with Pan near the Par- 
thenian forest, and he had said that he was friendly to the Athenians, and would 
come out and help them at Marathon. Pan has been honored therefore for this 
message." — Pausanias in Description of Greece. 

For full account of the battle of Marathon, consult Creasy's Fifteen Decisive 
Battles. There seems no historic foundation for the closing incident related by 
Browning. 

This motto is the Greek: " Rejoice, we conquer." " Rejoice " was the usual 
Greek salutation, born of Marathon day. 

2. Daemons (Gr. daimon). Spirits. 

4. Zeus. The supreme Greek god. Her of the aegis and spear. Pallas- 
Athene, the guardian goddess of Athens, the only deity whose authority was 
equal to that of Zeus. This aegis was a wonderful shield given to her by her 
father Zeus. 



38 PHEIDIPPIDES 

Also ye of the bow and the buskin, praised be your peer, 
Now, henceforth and forever, — O latest to whom I upraise 
Hand and heart and voice! For Athens, leave pasture and 

flock! 
Present to help, potent to save, Pan — patron I call! 

Archons of Athens, topped by the tettix, see, I return! 
See, 'tis myself here standing alive, no specter that speaks! 
Crowned with the myrtle, did you command me, Athens and 

you, II 

*' Run, Pheidippides, run and race, reach Sparta for aid! 
Persia has come, we are here, where is She?" Your com- 
mand I obeyed, 
Ran and raced: like stubble, some field which a fire runs 

through 
Was the space between city and city; two days, two nights 

did I burn ' 15 

Over the hills, under the dales, down pits and up peaks. 
Into their midst I broke: breath served but for '' Persia has 

come! 
Persia bids Athens proffer slaves'-tribute, water and earth; 
Razed to the ground is Eretria — but Athens, shall Athens 

sink. 
Drop into dust and die — the flower of Hellas utterly die, 20 
Die with the wide world spitting at Sparta, the stupid, the 

stander-by? 
Answer me quick, what help, what hand do you stretch o'er 

destruction's brink? 

5. Ye of the bow and the buskin. Artemis and Phoebus-Apollo, whose sym- 
bols these were. 

8. Pan. The Greek god of the woods, always represented as having the legs 
of a goat. 

o. Archons (Gr. archoy rule). The chief magistrates of Athens after the ces- 
sation of kingly rule. Tettix (Gr.). A grasshopper. " The Athenians sometimes 
wore golden grasshoppers in their hair as badges of honor," because they thought 
those insects sprang from the ground, and they claimed for their ancestors similar 
origin. 

18. Water and earth. In token of submission. 

19. Razed. Destroyed utterly. 



PHEIDIPPIDES 39 

How — when? No care for my limbs! — there's lightning in 

all and some — 
Fresh and fit your message to bear, once lips give it birth! " 

O my Athens — Sparta love thee? Did Sparta respond? 25 
Every face of her leered in a furrow of envy, mistrust, 
Malice, — each eye of her gave me its glitter of gratified hate! 
Gravely they turned to take counsel, to cast for excuses. I 

stood 
Quivering, — the limbs of me fretting as fire frets, an inch 

from dry wood: 29 

'' Persia has come, Athens asks aid, and still they debate? 
Thunder, thou Zeus! Athene, are Spartans a quarry beyond 
Swing of thy spear? Phoibos and Artemis, clang them ' Ye 

must'! " 

No bolt launched from Olumpos! Lo, their answer at last! 

" Has Persia come, — does Athens ask aid, — may Sparta be- 
friend? 34 

Nowise precipitate judgment — too weighty the issue at stake! 

Count we no time lost time which lags thro' respect to the 
Gods! 

Ponder that precept of old, ' No warfare, whatever the odds 

In your favor, so long as the moon, half-orbed, is unable to 
take 

Full-circle her state in the sky! ' Already she rounds to it 
fast: 

Athens must wait, patient as we — who judgment suspend." 

Athens, — except for that sparkle, — thy name, I had moldered 
to ash! 41 

That sent a blaze thro' my blood; ofif, off and away was I 
back, 

— Not one word to waste, one look to lose on the false and 
the vile! 

33. Olumpos. A loft}' mountain in Thessaly, whose cloudy summit was be- 
lieved to be the home of the gods. 



40 PHEIDIPPIDES 

Yet '' O Gods of my land!" I cr'.c 1, as each hillock and 

plain, 
Wood and stream, I knew, I named, rushing past them again, 
" Have ye kept faith, proved mindful of honors we paid you 

erewhile? 46 

Vain was the filleted victim, the fulsome libation! Too rash 
Love in its choice, paid you so largely service so slack! 

*' Oak and olive and bay, — I bid you cease to enwreathe 
Brows made bold by your leaf! Fade at the Persian's foot. 
You that, our patrons were pledged, should never adorn a 

slave! 51 

Rather I hail thee, Parnes, — trust to thy wild waste tract! 
Treeless, herbless, lifeless mountain! What matter if 

slacked 
My speed may hardly be, for homage to crag and to cave 
No deity deigns to drape Vvith verdure? — at least I can 

breathe, 55 

Fear in thee no fraud from the blind, no lie from the mute! " 
Such my cry as, rapid, I ran over Parnes' ridge; 
Gully and gap I clambered and cleared till, sudden, a bar 
Jutted, a stoppage of stone against me, blocking the way. 
Right! for I minded the hollow to traverse, the fissure across: 
''Where I could enter, there I depart by! Night in the 

fosse? 61 

Athens to aid? Tho' the dive were thro' Erebos, thus I 

obey — 

47. Filleted. Animals about to be sacrificed to the trnds were nd-Tned with 
garlands. Every sacrifice was accompanied by a libation, w ine poured on the 
ground in honor of the deity. Fulsome (.M?>. Jn s?{ni, ful, full -J- sum, some). 
Here used with its early meaning of full, rich, not its later acquired meaning of 
over-rich, hence disgusting. 

4g. Zeus is frequently depicted with his head carhuidrd w ith oak leaves. The 
o'ive tree, symbol of peace and plenty, was sacred to Aihene, as was the bay or 
laurel to Apollo. 

52. Parnes. These mountains were north of Athens, outside of Pheidippides' 
route, 

61. Fosse iy^./o^sa). A ditch. 



PHEIDIPPIDES 4I 

Out of the day dive, into the day as bravely arise! No 

bridge 
Better! " — when — ha! what was it I came on, of wonders that 

are? 

There, in the cool of a cleft, sat he— majestical Pan! 65 

Ivy drooped w^anton, kissed his head, moss cushioned his 

hoof: 
All the great God was good in the eyes grave-kindly — the 

curl 
Carved on the bearded cheek, amused at a mortal's aw^e 
As, under the human trunk, the goat-thighs grand I saw. 
'' Halt, Pheidippides! "—halt I did, my brain of a vvhirl: 70 
"Hither to me! Why pale in my presence?" he gracious 

began: 
'' How is it, — Athens, only in Hellas, holds me aloof? 

"Athens, she only, rears m.e no fane, makes me no feast! 

Wherefore? Than I what godship to Athens more helpful 
of old? 74 

Aye, and still, and forever her friend! Test Pan, trust me! 

Go, bid Athens take heart, laugh Persia to scorn, have faith 

In the temples and tombs! Go, say to Athens, 'The Goat- 
God saith: 

When Persia— so much as strews not the soil— is cast in the 
sea. 

Then praise Pan who fought in the ranks vrith your most and 
least, 

Goat-thigh to greaved-thigh, made one cause with the free 
and the bold! ' 80 

"Say Pan saith: 'Let this, foreshowing the place, be the 

pledge!'" 
(Gay, the liberal hand held out this herbage I bear 

66. The ivy was consecrated lo Pan. 'Wanton, Hanging loose. C/. Para- 
disr Lost iv, 366. 

80. Cf. Note on I. 8. Greaves were armor worn to protect the legs from knee 
to ankle. 



42 PHEIDIPPIDES 

—Fennel,— I grasped it a-trenible with dew— whatever it 

bode), 
*' While, as for thee . . ." But enough! He was gone. If 

I ran hitherto — 
Be sure that the rest of my journey, I ran no longer, but 

flew. 85 

Parnes to Athens— earth no more, the air was my road; 
Here am I back. Praise Pan, we stand no more on the 

razor's edge! 
Pan for Athens, Pan for me! I too have a guerdon rare! 



Then spoke ]\liltiades. '' And thee, best runner of Greece, 
Whose limbs did duty indeed, — what gift is promised thyself? 
Tell it us straightway, — Athens the mother demands of her 

son! " 91 

Rosily blushed the youth: he paused: but. lifting at length 
His eyes from the ground, it seemed as he gathered the rest 

of his strength 
Into the utterance — " Pan spoke thus: ' For what thou hast 

done 
Count on a worthy reward! Henceforth be allowed thee 

release 95 

From the racer's toil, no vulgar reward in praise or in pelf! ' 

*' I am bold to believe, Pan means reward the most to my 

mind! 
Fight I shall, with our foremost, wherever this fennel may 

grow,— 
Pound — Pan helping us — Persia to dust, and. under the deep, 
Whelm her away for ever; and then, — no Athens to save. — 
]Marry a certain maid, I know keeps faith to the brave, — loi 
Hie to my house and home: and, when my children shall 

creep 

83. Fennel (Gr. marathon'). A common herb. The field of Marathon was 
so named because overgrown with this plant. What was the significance of Pan's 
gift? 

89. Miltiadcs. The great Athenian general selected for supreme command at 
Marathon. 



PHEIDIPPIDES 43 

Close to my knees, — recount how the God was awful yet 

kind, 
Promised their sire reward to the full — rewarding him — 

so!" 



Unforeseeing one! Yes, he fought on the Marathon day: 

So, when Persia was dust, all cried ''To Akropolis! io6 

Run, Pheidippides, one race more! the meed is thy due! 

'Athens is saved, thank Pan,' go shout!" He flung down 
his shield, 

Ran like fire once more: and the space 'twixt the Fennel- 
field 

And Athens was stubble again, a field which a fire runs 
through, no 

Till in he broke: " Rejoice, we conquer! " Like wine thro' 
clay, 

Joy in his blood bursting his heart, he died — the bliss! 

So, to this day, when friend meets friend, the word of salute 
Is still "Rejoice!" — his word which brought rejoicing in- 
deed. 114 
So is Pheidippides happy for ever, — the noble strong man 
Who could race like a god, bear the face of a god, whom a 

god loved so well. 
He saw the land saved he had helped to save, and was suf- 
fered to tell 
Such tidings, yet never decline, but, gloriously as he began, 
So to end gloriously — once to shout, thereafter be mute: 
*' Athens is saved!" — Pheidippides dies in the shout for his 
meed. 120 

106. Akropolis (Gr. akros, height -{- polis, city.) The citadel of Athens. 
118. How did the fame of Miltiades and Themistocles decline? 



44 A GRAMMARIANS FUNERAL 

A Grammarian *s Funeral * 

SHORTLY AFTER THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING IN EUROPE 

Let us begin and carry up this corpse, 

Singing together. 
Leave we the common crofts, the vulgar thorpes, 

Each in its tether 
Sleeping safe on the bosom of the plain, 5 

Cared-for till cock-crow: 
Look out if yonder be not day again 

Rimming the rock-row! 
That's the appropriate country; there man's thought, 

Rarer, intenser, 10 

Self-gathered for an outbreak, as it ought, 

Chafes in the censer. 
Leave we the unlettered plain its herd and crop; 

Seek we sepulture 
On a tall mountain, citied to the top, 15 

Crowded with culture ! 
All the peaks soar, but one the rest excels; 

Clouds overcome it; 

* The Gra77t>narian''s Fi( neral vjslS published in 1855 J" ^^^ vohime. Men and 
Women. 

Grammarian is here used, not in its present narrow sense, but with the broader 
meaning of a scholar, a student whose life was devoted to letters. No particular 
person is indicated, but the spirit is that which animated many a scholar — a Scal- 
iger, a Casaubon, a Pierre de Maricourt — of the early Renaissance period, the 
Revival of Learning which, beginning in Italy, spread over all Europe, and 
marked the transition from mediaeval to modern history. The speaker is one of the 
dead Grammarian's disciples who are bearing him to the mountain top — a fit 
burial-place for him of lofty aspirations. The parentheses give the leader's 
directions to the corpse-bearers. Note t' e effect and appropriateness of the meter, 
the long iambic followed by the short adonic. 

3. Crofts (AS. croft). Fields or little farms. Thorpes CAS. tJiorf). Villa,';es 
or hamlets. Common and vulgar refer to the ignorant and uneducated people 
of these crofts and thorpes. 

4. Tether CAS teodor., halter). Narrow bounds. 
8. Rock-row. Mountain ridge. 

i3. Overcome. Pass over ; overshadow. Cf. Macbeth iii. 4, 3. 



A GRAMMARIAN S FUNERAL 45 

No! yonder sparkle is the citadel's 

Circling its summit. 20 

Thither our path lies; wind we up the heights: 

Wait ye the warning? 
Our low life was the level's and the night's: 

He's for the morning. 
Step to a tune, square chests, erect each head, 25 

'Ware the beholders! 
This is our master, famous, calm, and dead, 

Borne on our shoulders. 

Sleep, crop and herd! sleep, darkling thorpe and croft 

Safe from the weather! 30 

He, whom we convoy to his grave aloft. 

Singing together. 
He was a man born wdth thy face and throat. 

Lyric Apollo! 
Long he lived nameless: how should spring take note 35 

Winter would follow? 
Till lo, the little touch, and youth w^as gone! 

Cramped and diminished, 
Moaned he, '' New measures, other feet anon! 

My dance is finished! " 40 

No, that's the world's way; (keep the mountain-side, 

Make for the city!) 
He knew the signal, and stepped on w^th pride 

Over micn's pity; 
Left play for work, and grappled with the w^orld 45 

Bent on escaping: 
"What's in the scroll," quoth he, "thou keepest furled? 

Show me their shaping. 
Theirs who most studied man, the bard and sage, — 

Give! " — So, he gowned him, 50 

Straight got by heart that book to its last page: 

Learned, we found him. 
Yea, but we found him bald too, eyes like lead, 

Accents uncertain: 

50. Gowned him. Took up the student life* 



46 A grammarian's funeral 

" Time to taste life," another would have said, 55 

** Up with the curtain! " 
This man said rather, '' Actual life comes next? 

Patience a moment! 
Grant I have mastered learning's crabbed text. 

Still there's the comment. 60 

Let me know all! Prate not of most or least. 

Painful or easy! 
Even to the crumbs I'd fain eat up the feast. 

Aye, nor feel queasy." 
Oh, such a life as he resolved to live, 65 

When he had learned it, 
When he had gathered all books had to give! 

Sooner, he spurned it. 
Image the whole, then execute the parts — 

Fancy the fabric 70 

Quite, ere you build, ere steel strike fire from quartz. 

Ere mortar dab brick! 

(Here's the town-gate reached; there's the market-place 

Gaping before us.) 
Yea, this in him was the peculiar grace 75 

(Hearten our chorus!) 
That before living he'd learn how to live — 

No end to learning: 
Earn the means first — God surely will contrive 

Use for our earning. 80 

Others mistrust and say, '' But time escapes! 

Live now or never! " 
He said, '' What's time? Leave Now for dogs and apes! 

Man has Forever." 
Back to his book then: deeper drooped his head: 85 

Calculus racked him: 



64. Queasy (Norw. kveis, sickness after a debauch). Qualmish, nauseated. 
70-72. Fabric, dab brick. Note effect of this and similar rhj'mes. 
86-88. Diseases attacked him. Calculus (L.). The stone. Tussis (L.). A 
cough* 



A GRAMMARIAN S FUNERAL 47 

Leaden before, his eyes grew dross of lead: 

Ttissis attacked him. 
'' Now, master, take a Httle rest! " — not he! 

(Caution redoubled! 90 

Step two abreast, the way winds narrowly!) 

Not a whit troubled. 
Back to his studies, fresher than at first, 

Fierce as a dragon 
He (soul-hydroptic with a sacred thirst) 95 

Sucked at the flagon. 
Oh, if we draw a circle premature, 

Heedless of far gain. 
Greedy for quick returns of profit, sure 

Bad is our bargain! lOO 

Was it not great? did not he throw on God 

(He loves the burthen) — 
God's task to make the heavenly period 

Perfect the earthen? 
Did not he magnify the mind, show clear 105 

Just what it all meant? 
He would not discount life, as fools do here, 

Paid by installmicnt. 
He ventured neck or nothing — heaven's success 

Found, or earth's failure: no 

" Wilt thou trust death or not? " He answered '' Yes! 

Hence with life's pale lure! " 
That low man seeks a little thing to do. 

Sees it and does it: 
This high man, with a great thing to pursue, 115 

Dies ere he knows it. 
That low man goes on adding one to one. 

His hundred's soon hit: 
This high man, aiming at a million. 

Misses an unit. 120 

95. Hydroptic (Gr. hydropikos). Dropsical, thirst}'-. " Every lust is a kind of 
hydropic distemper, and the more we drink the more we shall thirst." — Tillotson. 

97, 103-104. Cf. Abt Vogler. *' On earth the broken arcs; in heaven the 
perfect round*" 



48 A grammarian's funeral 

That, has the world here — should he need the next, 

Let the world mind him! 
This, throws Himself on God, and unperplexed 

Seeking shall lind him. 
So, with the throttling hands of death at strife, 125 

Grourid he at grammar; 
Still, thro' the rattle, parts of speech were rife: 

While he could stammer 
He settled Hotis business — let it be! — 

Properly based Otin — * 130 

Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De, 

Dead from the waist down. 
Well, here's the platform, here's the proper place: 

Hail to your purlieus. 
All ye highfliers of the feathered race, 135 

Swallows and curlews! 
Here's the top-peak; the multitude below 

Live, for they can, there: 
This man decided not to Live but Know — 

Bury this man there? 140 

Here — here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form. 

Lightnings are loosened, 
Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm, 

Peace let the dew send! 
Lofty designs must close in like effects: 145 

Loftily lying, 
Leave him— still loftier than the world suspects, 

Living and dying. 

123. The keynote of this poem is P)ro\vniii£::'s favorite tenet, which the Talmud 
thus words : " It is not incumbent on thee to complete the work : but thou must 
not therefore desist from it." 

129-131. To know the whole he would perfect himself in the minutest parts. 
Hot/\ the Greek particle, on, that, etc. Oufu the Greek pnrticle, ovv, then, etc. 
Concerning " the doctrine of the enclitic /V," I'lrowning cited scholarly authority 
and said *' that De meaning ' towards ' and as a demonstrative appendage is not to 
be confounded with the accentuated De meaning ' but,' was the ' doctrine ' which 
the Grammarian bequeathed to those capable of receiving it. 

134. Purlieus (L. per, through + Fr. allee, go). Outlying districts. 

141. This man of lofty aspirations must have a burial place symbolic of his past 
and future. 



CAVALIER TUNES 49 

CAVALIER TUNES 

I 

Cavalier Tunes * 



Kentish Sir Byng stood for his King, 

Bidding the crop-headed Parliament swing: 

A.nd, pressing a troop unable to stoop 

And see the rogues flourish and honest folk droop, 

Marched them along, fifty-score strong, 

Great-hearted gentlemen, singing this song. 



God for King Charles! Pym and such carles 

To the Devil that prompts 'em their treasonous paries! 

Cavaliers, up! Lips from the cup, 

Hands from the pasty, nor bite take nor sup, 10 

Till you're — 

(Chorus) Afa?'c/nng along, fifty-score stroiig. 

Great-hearted ge7itlemen, si7igi7ig this sojig. 

Ill 

Hampden to hell, and his obsequies' knell 

Serve Hazelrig, Fiennes, and young Harry as well! 

* These tliree songs were included in the Dramatic Lyrics published in 1842 as 
the third number of Beiis and Pomegranates. The third was originally entitled 
Mv Wife Gertrude. They have been set to music by Dr. Villiers Stanford. 

" The speaker is a typical cavalier of the days of Charles I., the time is the 
heio:ht of the Civil War with the issue still in the balance, the place a banquet 
hall echoing the clash of glas<;es and sh'^uts of cavaliers." 

T. John Pym, John Hampden-, Sir Arthur Hazelrig, William Fiennes, and Sir 
Harry Vane " the Younger " were English patriot statesmen. Prince Rupert was 
a Bavarian soldier, a general in the army of his uncle, Charles I, 

7. Carles (Dial., Eng.). Churls, rustics— in contempt, 

3, Paries (Fr./rtr/^7-, speak). Parleys. 



50 



CAVALIER TUNES 



England, good cheer! Rupert is near! 15 

Kentish and loyalist, keep we not here, 

(Chorus) MarcJiing aluJig , fifty-score stro7ig, 

Great-Iiearted gentlcuioi, singing this song. 



IV 



Then, God for King Charles! Pym and his snarls 

To the Devil that pricks on sucli pestilent carles! 20 

Hold by the right, you double your might; 

So, onward to Nottingham, fresh for the fight, 

(Chorus) March we along, fifty-score strong. 

Great-hearted gentlemen, singing this song I 



II 

GIVE A ROUSE 



King Charles, and who'll do him right now? 
King Charles, and who's ripe for fight now? 
Give a rouse: here's, in hell's despite now. 
King Charles! 

II 

Who gave me the goods that went since? 
Who raised me the house that sank once? 
Who helped me to gold I spent since? 
Who found me in wine you drank once? 
(Chorus) King Charles, and who'll do him right 7iow ? 

King Charles, and who's ripe for fight now ? 

Give a rouse : here's, in hell's despite now. 

King Charles I 

II. RpusQ (Sw. rum, rush). "An awakening to or a signal for action," 



CAVALIER TUNES $1 

III 

To whom used my boy George quaff else, 

By the old fool's side that begot him? 

For whom did he cheer and laugh else, 15 

While Noll's damned troopers shot him? 
(Chorus) King Charles ^ and who'll do him rigt^ now ? 
King Charles, and who's ripe for fight now ? 
Give a rouse : here's^ in helVs despite now, 
King Charles I 20 



III 

BOOT AND SADDLE 



Boot, saddle, to horse, and away! 
Rescue my castle before the hot day 
Brightens to blue from its silvery gray, 

(Chorus) " Boot, saddle, to horse, and away !^^ 

II 

Ride past the suburbs, asleep as you'd say; 5 

Many's the friend there, will listen and pray 
" God's luck to gallants that strike up the lay — 

(Chorus) " Boot, saddle, to horse, and away I " 

III 

Forty miles off, like a roebuck at bay, 

Flouts Castle Brancepeth the Roundheads' array: 10 

Who laughs, '' Good fellows ere this, by my fay, 

(Chorus) '* Boot, saddle, to horse, and away I " 

16. Noll. Oliver Cromwell, England's patriot general and statesman, after 
Charles L's execution Lord Protector of England. 
in. 10. Flouts {W^, fluyten, jeer, play the flute). Scoff, mock. 
II, Fay, An archaic form oi/aith* 



52 AN EPISTLE 

IV 

Who? ]\Iy wife Gertrude; that, honest and gay, 
Laughs when you talk of surrendering, " Nay! 
I've better counselors; what counsel they? 15 

(Chorus) " Boof, saddle, to horse, a?id away I " 

Song From ** Pippa Passes " ^ 

The year's at the spring, 

And day's at the morn; 

Morning's at seven; 

The hill-side's dew-pearled; 

The lark's on the wing; 5 

The snail's on the thorn; 

God's in His heaven — 

All's right with the world! 



An Epistle \ 

CONTAINING THE STRANGE MEDICAL EXPERIENCE OF KAR- 
SHISH, THE ARAB PHYSICIAN 

Karshish, the picker-up of learning's crumbs, 
The not-incurious in God's handiwork 
(This man's-flesh he hath admirably made, 
Blown like a bubble, kneaded like a paste, 

* Pippa's hymn strikes the keynote of the whole poem, asserting that " the ser- 
vice of all God's children is equally valuable in his sight.'' 

•\ An Epistle was begun at Rome in the winter of 1853-54, and finished later at 
Florence. It was published in Men and Women, 1855. 

The poem is based on the account given in John ii. 1-46 of Christ's healing of 
Lazarus. Hardly less remarkable than the depictment of the effect of Lazarus' 
experience on his subsequent life is the psychological study of the learned leech, 
with his incredulous, science-trained intellect and his heart hungering for God's 
truth. Despite his protestations, we soon feel that it is to tell this strange tale of 
Lazarus— not to discourse of spiders and borage— that he writes to his master, 
and the truth breaks out at the last in that yearning eloquent cry for the God of 
Love. 



AN EPISTLE 53 

To coop up and keep down on earth a space 5 

That puff of vapor from his mouth, man's soul) 

— To Abib, all-sagacious in our art, 

Breeder in me of what poor skill I boast, 

Like me inquisitive how pricks and cracks 

Befall the fiesh thro' too much stress and strain, lo 

Whereby the wily vapor fain would slip 

Back and rejoin its source before the term, — 

And aptest in contrivance (under God) 

To bafiie it by deftly stopping such: — 

The vagrant Scholar to his sage at home 15 

Sends greeting (health and knowledge, fame with peace) 

Three samples of true snake-stone — rarer still, 

One of the other sort, the melon-shaped, 

(But fitter, pounded fine, for charms than drugs) 

And writeth now the twenty-second time. 20 

My journeyings were brought to Jericho: 
Thus I resume. Who studious in our art 
Shall count a little labor unrepaid? 
I have shed sweat enough, left flesh and bone 
On m.any a flinty furlong of this land. 25 

Also the country-side is all on fire 
With rumors of a marching hitherward: 
Some say Vespasian cometh, some, his son. 
A black lynx snarled and pricked a tufted ear: 
Lust of my blood inflamed his yellow balls: 30 

I cried and threw my staff and he was gone. 
Twice have the robbers stripped and beaten me, 
And once a town declared me for a spy; 
But at the end, I reach Jerusalem, 

17. Snakestone. Placed upon a snake-bite, it was supposed to absorb or 
charm awaA'- the poison. 

21. Were brought. That is, in his last letter. 

22-33. See the true spirit of the man of science, — his zeal in pursuit of knowl- 
edge, his contempt of hindering dangers. 

28. This gives us the date of the Epistle. Titus Flavins Vespasianus was sent by 
Nero in 66 to conduct the war against the Jews ; when proclaimed emperor in 70 
he left his son to carry on the war. 



54 AN EPISTLE 

Since this poor covert where I pass the night, 35 

This Bethany, lies scarce the distance thence 

A man with plague-sores at the third degree 

Runs till he drops down dead. Thou laughest here! 

'Sooth, it elates me, thus reposed and safe. 

To void the stuffing of my travel-scrip 40 

And share with thee whatever Jewry yields. 

A viscid choler is observable 

In tertians, I was nearly bold to say; 

And falling-sickness hath a happier cure 

Than our school wots of: there's a spider here 45 

Weaves no web, watches on the ledge of tombs, 

Sprinkled with mottles on an ash-gray back; 

Take five and drop them . . . but who knows his 

mind. 
The Syrian run-a-gate I trust this to? 
His service payeth me a sublimate 50 

Blown up his nose to help the ailing eye. 
Best wait: I reach Jerusalem at morn. 
There set in order my experiences, 
Gather what most deserves, and give thee all — 
Or I might add, Judaea's gum-tragacanth 55 

Scales off in purer flakes, shines clearer-grained, 
Cracks 'twixt the pestle and the porphyry. 
In fine exceeds our produce. Scalp-disease 
Confounds me, crossing so with leprosy: 
Thou hadst admired one sort I gained at Zoar — 60 
But zeal outruns discretion. Here I end. 



36. Bethany. A village two miles from Jerusalem. The leech indicates the 
distance vividly and characteristically. 

42. Choler (Gr. chole^ bile). Here used in its original sense of bile. 

45. Spider. Probably one of the saltigrade species, which springs on its prey 
like a cat or tiger. Spiders were used internally and externally for medicine down 
to a comparatively recent period. Sir Walter Raleigh, for instance, approved the 
healing virtues of a certain spider preparation. 

57. Porphyry. A hard stone used by the ancients as a mortar. 

60. Hadst. Wouldst have. Zoar. One of " the cities of the plain," near the 
Dead Sea ; cf. Gen. xix. 22. 



AN EPISTLE 55 

Yet Stay! my Syrian blinketh gratefully, 
Protesteth his devotion is my price — 
Suppose I write what harms not, tho' he steal? 
I half resolve to tell thee, yet I blush, 65 

What set me off a-writing first of all. 
An itch I had, a sting to write, a tang! 
For, be it this town's barrenness — or else 
The Man had something in the look of him — 
His case has struck me far more than 'tis worth. 70 

So, pardon if — (lest presently 1 lose. 
In the great press of novelty at hand, 
The care and pains this somehow stole from me) 
I bid thee take the thing while fresh in mind. 
Almost in sight — for, wilt thou have the truth? 75 

The very man is gone from, me but now. 
Whose ailment is the subject of discourse. 
Thus then, and let thy better wit help all! 

'Tis but a case of mania: subinduced 
By epilepsy, at the turning point 80 

Of trance prolonged unduly some three days 
When, by the exhibition of some drug 
Or spell, exorcization, stroke of art 
Unknown to me and which 'twere well to know, 
The evil thing, outbreaking all at once, 85 

Left the man whole and sound of body indeed, — 
But, flinging (so to speak) life's gates too wide, 
Making a clear house of it too suddenly. 
The first conceit that entered might inscribe 
Whatever it was minded on the wall 90 

So plainly at that vantage, as it were, 
(First come, first served) that nothing subsequent 
Attaineth to erase those fancy-scrawls 
The just-returned and new-established soul 



63. et seq. Karshish protests that it is because he fears to trust his Syrian 
messenger with important matters that he tells the idle tale of Lazarus— thus 
deprecating Abib's scorn. 

82. Exhibition. Here has its medical sense— to administer a remedy. 



56 AN EPISTLE 

Hath gotten now so thoroughly by heart 95 

That henceforth she will read or these or none. 

And first — the man's own firm conviction rests 

That he was dead (in fact they buried him) 

— That lie was dead and then restored to life 

By a Nazarene physician of his tribe: lOO 

— 'Saycth, the same bade " Rise," and he did rise. 

*' Such cases are diurnal," thou wilt cry. 

Not so this figment! — not, that such a fume, 

Instead of giving way to time and health, 

Should cat itself into the life of life, 105 

As saffron tingeth flesh, blood, bones, and all! 

For seCj how he takes up the aflcr-'.ife. 

The man — it is one Lazarus a Jew, 

Sanguine, proportioned, fifty years of age, 

The body's habit wholly laudable, no 

As much, indeed, beyond the common health 

As he were made and put aside to show. 

Think, could we penetrate by any drug 

And bathe the wearied soul and worried flesh, 

And bring it clear and fair, by three days' sleep! 115 

Whence has the man the balm that brightens all? 

This grown man eyes the world now like a child. 

Some elders of his tribe, I should premise, 

Led in their friend, obedient as a sheep. 

To bear my inquisition. While they spoke, 120 

Now sharply, now with sorrow, — told the case, — 

He listened not except I spoke to him. 

But folded his two hands and let them talk, 

Watching the flies that buzzed: and yet no fool. 

And that's a sample how his years must go. 125 

Look if a beggar, in fixed middle-life. 

Should find a treasure, — can he use the same 

With straitened habits and with tastes starved small, 

And take at once to his impoverished brain 

The sudden element that changes things, 130 



103. Fume. A fancy. 



AN EPISTLE 57 

That sets the undreamed-of rapture at his hand, 

And puts the cheap old joy in the scorned dust? 

Is he not such an one as moves to mirth — 

Warily parsimonious, when no need, 

Wasteful as drunkenness at undue times? 135 

All prudent counsel as to what hefits 

The golden mean, is lost on such an one: 

The man's fantastic will is the man's law. 

So here— we call the treasure knowledge, say, 

Increased beyond the fleshly faculty— 140 

Heaven opened to a soul while yet on earth. 

Earth forced on a soul's use while seeing heaven: 

The man is witless of the size, the sum, 

The value in proportion of all things, 

Or whether it be little or be much. 145 

Discourse to him of prodigious armaments 

Assembled to besiege his city now, 

And of the passing of a mule with gourds— 

'Tis one! Then take it on the other side. 

Speak of some trifling fact,— he will gaze rapt 150 

With stupor at its very littleness, 

(Far as I see) as if in that indeed 

He caught prodigious import, whole results; 
And so will turn to us the bystanders 

In ever the same stupor (note the point) I55 

That we too see not with his opened eyes. 

Wonder and doubt come wrongly into play, 

Preposterously, at cross purposes. . 

Should his child sicken unto death,— why, look 

For scarce abatement of his cheerfulness, 160 

Or pretermission of the daily craft! 

While a word, gesture, glance from that same child 

At play or in the school or laid asleep. 

Will startle him to an agony of fear, 

Exasperation, just as like. Demand 165 

The reason why—'' 'tis but a word," object— 

" A gesture "—he regards thee as our lord 

167. Our lord. Some sage under whom Abib and Karshish had studied. 



58 AN EPISTLE 

Who lived there in the pyramid alone, 

Looked at us (dost thou mind?) when, being young, 

We both would unadvisedly recite 170 

Some charm's beginning, from that book of his, 

Able to bid the sun throb wide and burst 

All into stars, as suns grown old are wont. 

Thou and the child have each a veil alike 174 

Thrown o'er your heads, from under which ye both 

Stretch your blind hands and trifle with a match 

Over a mine of Greek fire, did ye know! 

He holds on firmly to some thread of life — 

(It is the life to lead perforcedly) 

Which runs across some vast distracting orb 180 

Of glory on either side that meager thread. 

Which, conscious of, he must not enter yet — 

The spiritual life around the earthly life: 

The law of that is known to him as this, 

His heart and brain move there, his feet stay here. 185 

So is the man perplext with impulses 

Sudden to start off crosswise, not straight on, 

Proclaiming what is right and wrong across. 

And not along, this black thread thro' the blaze — 

" It should be " balked by '' here it cannot be." 190 

And oft the man's soul springs into his face 

As if he saw again and heard again 

His sage that bade him '' Rise " and he did rise. 

Something, a word, a tick o' the blood within 

Admonishes: then back he sinks at once 195 

To ashes, who was very fire before, 

In sedulous recurrence to his trade 

Whereby he earneth him the daily bread; 

And studiously the humbler for that pride, 

177. Greek fire. This is an anachronism, as Greek fire was first used in warfare 
by the Byzantine Greeks against the Saracens at the siege of Constantinople in 
673 A. D. Liquid fire, however, was used by the ancients. Gibbon says (Ch. 57): 
*' It would seem that the principal ingredient was the naphtha or liquid bitumen; 
a light, tenacious inflammable oil, which springs from the earth and catches fire us 
soon as it comes in contact with the air." 



AN EPISTLE 59 

Professedly the faultier that he knows 200 

God's secret, while he holds the thread of life. 
Indeed the especial marking of the man 
Is prone submission to the heavenly will — 
Seeing it, what it is, and why it is. 

'Sayeth, he will wait patient to the last 205 

For that same death which must restore his being 
To equilibrium, body loosening soul 
Divorced even now by premature full growth: 
He will live, nay, it pleaseth him to live 
So long as God please, and just how God please. 210 
He even seeketh not to please God more 
(Which meaneth, otherwise) than as God please. 
Hence, I perceive not he affects to preach 
The doctrine of his sect whate'er it be. 
Make proselytes as madmen thirst to do: 215 

How can he give his neighbor the real ground, 
His own conviction? Ardent as he is — 
Call his great truth a lie, why, still the old 
" Be it as God please " reassureth him. 
I probed the sore as thy disciple should: 220 

** How, beast," said I, ** this stolid carelessness 
Sufiftceth thee, when Rome is on her march 
To stamp out like a little spark thy town. 
Thy tribe, thy crazy tale, and thee at once? " 
He merely looked with his large eyes on me. 225 

The man is apathetic, you deduce? 
Contrariwise, he loves both old and young, 
Able and weak, affects the very brutes 
And birds — how say I? flowers of the field- 
As a wise workman recognizes tools 230 
In a master's workshop, loving what they make. 
Thus is the man as harmless as a lamb: 
Only impatient, let him do his best. 
At ignorance and carelessness and sin — 
An indignation which is promptly curbed: 235 
As when in certain travel I have feigned 



6c AN EPISTLE 

To be an ignoramus in our art 

According to some preconceived design, 

And happed to hear the land's practitioners 

Steeped in conceit sublimed by ignorance, 240 

Prattle fantastically on disease, 

Its cause and cure — and I must hold my peace! 

Thou wilt object — Why have I not ere this 
Sought out the sage himself, the Nazarene 
Who wrought this cure, inquiring at the source, 245 

Conferring with the frankness that befits? 
Alas! it grieveth me, the learned leech 
Perished in a tumult many years ago, 
Accused, — our learning's fate, — of wizardry, 
Rebellion, to the setting up a rule 250 

And creed prodigious as described to me. 
His death, which happened when the earthquake fell 
(Prefiguring, as soon appeared, the loss 
To occult learning in our lord the sage 
Who lived there in the pyramid alone) 255 

Was wrought by the mad people — that's their wont! 
On vain recourse, as I conjecture it. 
To his tried virtue, for miraculous help — 
How could he stop the earthquake? That's their way! 
The other imputations must be lies: 260 

But take one, tho' I loathe to give it thee. 
In mere respect for any good man's fame. 
(And after all, our patient Lazarus 
Is stark mad; should we count on what he says? 
Perhaps not: tho' in writing to a leech 265 

'Tis well to keep back nothing of a case.) 
This man so cured regards the curer, then. 
As — God forgive me! who but God himself, 
Creator and sustainer of the world, 

That came and dwelt in flesh on it awhile. 270' 

— 'Sayeth that such an one was born and lived. 
Taught, healed the sick, broke bread at his own house, 



AN EPISTLE 6l 

Then died, with Lazarus by, for aught I know, 

And yet v/as . . . what I said nor choose repeat, 

And must have so avouched himself, in fact, 275 

In hearing of this very Lazarus 

Who saith — but why all this of what he saith? 

Why write of trivial matters, things of price 

Calling at every moment for remark? 

I notic^-f on the margin of a pool 280 

Blue-flowering borage, the Aleppo sort, 

Aboundeth, very nitrous. It is strange! 

Thy pardon for this long and tedious case. 
Which, now that I review it, needs must seem 
Unduly dwelt upon, prolixly set forth! 285 

Nor I myself discern in what is writ 
Good cause for the peculiar interest 
And awe indeed this man has touched me with. 
Perhaps the journey's end, the weariness 
Had wrought upon me first. I met him thus: 290 

I crossed a ridge of short sharp broken hills 
Like an old lion's cheek teeth. Out there came 
A moon made like a face with certain spots 
Multiform, manifold, and menacing: 
Then a wind rose behind me. So we met 295 

In this old sleepy town at unaware. 
The man and I. I send thee what is writ. 
Regard it as a chance, a matter risked 
To this ambiguous Syrian: he may lose, 
Or steal, or give it thee with equal good. 300 

Jerusalem's repose shall make amends 
For time this letter wastes, thy time and mine; 
Till when, once more thy pardon and farewell! 

281. Blue-flowering borage. A plant valued for its stimulating medical 
properties. " The ancients deemed this plant one of the four ' cordial flowers,' 
for cheering the spirits, the others being the rose, violet, and alkanet." Aleppo. 
A city of Sj'ria. 

289-303. Karshish apologizes for dwelling at length on the case of this recovered 
epileptic Jew, and promises to write at leisure from Jerusalem on matters of more 
moment. 



62 PARTING AT MORNING 

The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think? 

So, the All-Great, were the All-Loving too — 305 

So, thro' the thunder comes a human voice 

Saying, " O heart I made, a heart beats here! 

Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself! 

Thou hast no power nor mayst conceive of mine: 

But love I gave thee, with myself to love, 310 

And thou must love me who have died for thee! " 

The madman saith He said so: it is strange. 

Meeting at Night * 



The gray sea and the long black land; 

And the yellow half-moon large and low; 

And the startled little waves that leap 

In fiery ringlets from their sleep, 

As I gain the cove with pushing prow, 5 

And quench its speed i' the slushy sand. 

II 
Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach; 
Three fields to cross till a farm appears; 
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch 
And the blue spurt of a lighted match, 10 

And a voice less loud, thro' its joys and fears, 
Than the two hearts beating each to each! 

Parting at Morning 

Round the cape of a sudden came the sea, 
And the sun looked over the mountain's rim: 
And straight was a path of gold for him, 
And the need of a world of men for me. 

304-312. Art and science are thrust aside : the man's very soul cries out for 
God,— the God of this despised " madman." 

'^- Meeting at Ni^ht and Parting at Morning were published in 1845 in the 
seventh number of Bells and Pomegranates. The speaker is a man who at night 
goes gladly home to peace and love, and at morning as gladly back to the world 
and work. 



PROSPICE 63 



Prospice * 

Fear death? — to feel the fog in my throat, 

The mist in my face, 
When the snows begin, and the blasts denote 

I am nearing the place. 
The power of the night, the press of the storm, 5 

The post of the foe; 
Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form, 

Yet the strong man must go: 
For the journey is done and the summit attained, 

And the barriers fall, 10 

Tho' a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained, 

The reward of it all. 
I was ever a fighter, so — one fight more, 

The best and the last! 
I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore. 

And bade me creep past. 16 

No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers 

The heroes of old, 
Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears 

Of pain, darkness, and cold. 20 

For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave. 

The black minute's at end. 
And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave. 

Shall dwindle, shall blend. 



*Prosj!>2ce {/oo^ /hriaard), written the fall after Mrs. Browning's death, was 
published in Dramatis Personce in 1864. It expresses the poet's scorn of the 
idle and cowardly fear of death, and his faith in personal immortality. " Death.'" 
said Browning when its shadow was over him, "is life, just as our daily, our mo- 
mentarily, dying body is none the less alive and ever recruiting new forces of 
existence. Without death, which is our crape-like churchyardy word for change, 
for growth, there could be no prolongation of that which we call life. . . For 
myself, I deny death as an end of anything. Never say of me that I am dead." 

7. Arch Fear. Death. 

II. Guerdon (LL. ividerdomtm. A half translation of the OHG. ividarlon^ 
Tvidar^ back again + ^on^ reward). Recompense. 

19. Brunt (Ice. ^^-^^wrt:, burn). " The ' brunt ' of the battle is the 'heat' of 
the battle where it burns most fiercely." — Trench^ 



64 EPILOGUE TO *'AS0LAND0'* 

Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain, 
Then a light, then thy breast, 26 

O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again, 
And with God be the rest! 

Epilogue to ** Asolando."* 

At the midnight in the silence of the sleep-time. 

When you set your fancies free, 
Will they pass to where — by death, fools think, imprisoned^ 
Low he lies who once so loved you, whom you loved so, 

—Pity me? 5 

Oh to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken! 

What had I on earth to do 
With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly? 
Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel 

— Being — who? 10 

One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, 

Never doubted clouds would break, 
Never dreamed, tho' right were w^orsted, wrong would 
triumph, 
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, 

Sleep to wake. 15 

No, at noonday in the bustle of man's work-time 

Greet the unseen with a cheer! 
Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be, 

'' Strive and thrive! " cry " Speed, — fight on, fare ever 

There as here! " 20 

27. A beautiful allusion to his wife. 

T/ie Ef>}Io^ue to Asolando^ 1889, is " the last word spoken by Browning to the 
world. It is an epilogue not only to Asolando but to the whole of his life . . . 
Yeminds us of Browning's bracing, tonic effect upon all of us, and the hopefulness 
and support he has afforded many in hours of gloom or trouble. Standing apart 
from criticism, the poem is brave, energetic, stimulant." — F. M. Wilson. 

Compare with this Tennyson's swan song, Crossing the Bar, Reread also 
Browning's Prospice, which it suggests. 

8. Mawkish ( Ice. ;;/^<///^;-, maggot). Sickening, insipid. 

13. Worsted. Defeated ; have the worst of it. 

19. Fare (AS. /aran^ travel). Go on ; often used impersonally. 



EVELYN HOPE 65 

Evelyn Hope 
Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead ! 

Sit and watch by her side an hour. 
That is her book-shelf, this her bed; 

She plucked that piece of geranium-flower, 
Beginning to die too, in the glass; 5 

Little has yet been changed, I think; 
The shutters are shut, no light may pass 

Save two long rays through the hinge's chink. 

Sixteen years old when she died I 

Perhaps she had scarcely heard my name; 10 

It was not her time to love; beside, 

Her life had many a hope and aim, 
Duties enough and little cares, 

And now was quiet, now astir, 
Till God's hand beckoned unawares, — 15 

And the sweet white brow is all of her. 

Is it too late, then, Evelyn Hope ? 

What, your soul was pure and true, 
The good stars met in your horoscope, 

Made you of spirit, fire and dew — 20 

And, just because I was thrice as old 

And our paths in the world diverged so wide. 
Each was naught to each, must I be told ? 

We were fellow mortals, naught beside ? 

No, indeed ! for God above 25 

Is great to grant, as mighty to make. 
And creates the love to reward the love: 

I claim you still, for my own love's sake ! 
Delayed it may be for more lives yet, 

Through worlds I shall traverse, not a (ew: 30 

Much is to learn, much to forget 

Ere the time be come for taking you. 



66 HOME-THOUGHTS FROM THE SEA 

But the time will come, — at last it will, 

When, Evelyn Hope, what meant (I shall say) 
In the lower earth, in the years long- still, 35 

That body and soul so pure and gay ? 
Why your hair was amber, 1 shall divine, 

And your mouth of your own geranium's red — 
And what you would do with me, in fine. 

In the new life come in the old one's stead. 40 

I have lived (I shall say) so much since then, 

Given up myself so many times, 
Gained me the gains of various men, 

Ransacked the ages, spoiled the climes; 
Yet one thing, one, in my soul's full scope, 45 

Either I missed or itself missed me: 
And I want and find you, Evelyn Hope ! 

WHiat is the issue ? let us see ! 

I loved you, Evelyn, all the while ! 

My heart seemed full as it could hold; 50 

There w^as place and to spare for the frank young smile. 

And the red young mouth, and the hair's young gold. 
So, hush, — I will give you this leaf to keep: 

See, I shut it inside the sweet cold hand ! 
There, that is our secret: go to sleep ! 55 

You will wake, and remember, and understand. 

Home-thoughts from the Sea * 

Nobly, nobly Cape Saint Vincent to the Northwest died away; 
Sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay; 
Bluish 'mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay; 
In the dimmest Northeast distance dawned Gibraltar grand 
and gray; 

* This poem is an expression of patriotic feeling awakened in the poet by 
parsing th6 settles of Nelson's great naval exploits^ 



ONE WORD MORE 67 

" Here and here did England help me: how can I help Eng- 
land ? " — say, 5 

Whoso turns as I, this evening, turn to God to praise and 
pray 

While Jove's planet rises yonder, silent over Africa. 

One Word More 
I 

There they are, my fifty men and women 
Naming me the fifty poems finished ! 
Take them, Love, the book and me together : 
Where the heart lies, let the brain lie also. 

II 

Rafael made a century of sonnets, 5 

Made and wrote them in a certain volume 

Dinted with the silver-pointed pencil 

Else he only used to draw Madonnas : 

These, the world might view — but one, the volume. 

Who that one, you ask ? Your heart instructs you. 10 

Did she live and love it all her lifetime ? 

Did she drop, his lady of the sonnets, 

Die, and let it drop beside her pillow 

Where it lay in place of Rafael's glory, 

Rafael's cheek so duteous and so loving— 15 

Cheek, the world was wont to hail a painter's, 

Rafael's cheek, her love had turned a poet's ? 

Ill 

You and I would rather read that volume, 

(Taken to his beating bosom by it) 

Lean and list the bosom-beats of Rafael, 20 

Would we not ? than wonder at Madonnas — 

Her, San Sisto names, and Her, Foligno, 



68 ONE WORD MORE 

Her, that visits Florence in a vision, 

Her, that's left with lilies in the Louvre — 

Seen by us and all the world in circle. 25 

IV 

You and I will never read that volume. 

Guido Reni, like his own eye's apple 

Guarded long the treasure-book and loved it. 

Guido Reni dying, all Bologna 

Cried, and the world too, ** Ours, the treasure !" 30 

Suddenly, as rare things wdll, it vanished. 



Dante once prepared to paint an angel : 

Whom to please ? You whisper *' Beatrice." 

While he mused and traced and retraced it, 

(Perad venture with a pen corroded 35 

Still by drops of that hot ink he dipped for, 

When, his left hand i' the hair o' the wicked. 

Back he held the brow and pricked its stigma, 

Bit into the live man's flesh for parchment, 

Loosed him, laughed to see the writing rankle, 40 

Let the wretch go festering through Florence) — 

Dante, who loved well because he hated, 

Hated wickedness that hinders loving, 

Dante standing, studying his angel, — 

In there broke the folk of his Inferno. 45 

Says he — "Certain people of importance " 

(Such he gave his daily dreadful line to) 

••Entered and would seize, forsooth, the poet." 

Says the poet — •' Then I stopped my painting." 

24. Louvre. The great museum in Paris. 

25. In circle. 'I'his last picture is circular in form.- 
27. Guido Reni (1575-1642). An Italian painter. 
33. Beatrice. Pronounce in four syllables. 



ONE WORD- MORE 69 

VI 

You and I would rather see that angel, S^ 

Painted by the tenderness of Dante, 
Would we not ? — than read a fresh Inferno. 

VII 

You and I will never see that picture. 

While he mused on love and Beatrice, 

While he softened o'er his outlined angel, 55 

In they broke, those " people of importance : " 

We and Bice bear the loss forever. 

VIII 

What of Rafael's sonnets, Dante's picture ? 

This : no artist lives and loves, that longs not 

Once, and only once, and for one only, 60 

(Ah, the prize !) to find his love a language 

Fit and fair and simple and sufficient — 

Using nature that's an art to others. 

Not, this one time, art that's turned his nature. 

Ay, of all the artists living, loving, 65 

None but would forego his proper dowry, — 

Does he paint ? he fain w^ould write a poem, — - 

Does he write ? he fain would paint a picture. 

Put to proof art alien to the artist's, 

Once, and only once, and for one only, 70 

So to be the man and leave the artist, 

Gain the man's joy, miss the artist's sorrow. 

IX 

Wherefore ? Heaven's gift takes earth's abatement ! 

He who smites the rock and spreads the water. 

Bidding drink and live a crowd beneath him, 75 

57. Bice. Pronounce in two syllables. 
74. Read Exodus xvii. 



70 ONE WORD MORE 

Even he, the minute makes immortal, 

Proves, perchance, but mortal in the minute. 

Desecrates, belike, the deed in doing. 

While he smites, how can he but remember, 

So he smote before, in such a pern, 80 

When they stood and mocked — "Shall smiting help us ? " 

When they drank and sneered — " A stroke is easy ! " 

When they wiped their mouths and went their journey, 

Throwing him for thanks — " But drought was pleasant." 

Thus old memories mar the actual triumph; 85 

Thus the doing savors of disrelish; 

Thus achievement lacks a gracious somewhat; 

O'er-importuned brows becloud the mandate, 

Carelessness or consciousness — the gesture. 

For he bears an ancient wrong about him, 90 

Sees and knows again those phalanxed faces. 

Hears, yet one time more, the 'customed prelude — 

" How shouldst thou, of all men, smite, and save us ? " 

Guesses what is like to prove the sequel — 

"Egypt's flesh-pots — nay, the drought was better." 95 

X 

Oh, the crowd must have emphatic warrant ! 
Theirs, the Sinai-forehead's cloven brilliance, 
Right-arm's rod-sweep, tongue's imperial fiat. 
Never dares the man put off the prophet. 

XI 

Did he love one face from out the thousands, 100 

(Were she Jethro's daughter, white and wifely, 
Were she but the Ethiopian bondslave,) 
He would envy yon dumb patient camel, 

97. Sinai-forehead. Read Exodus xxiv, xxxii, and xxxiv. 
loi. Jethro's daughter. Read Exodus ii and iii. 



ONE WORD MORE 71 

Keeping a reserve of scanty water 

Meant to save his own life in the desert; 105 

Ready in the desert to deliver 

(Kneeling down to let his breast be opened) 

Hoard and life together for his mistress. 

XII 

I shall never, in the years remaining, 

Paint you pictures, no, nor carve you statues, no 

Make you music that should all-express me; 

So it seems: I stand on my attainment. 

This of verse alone, one life allows me; 

Verse and nothing else have I to give you. 

Other heights in other lives, God willing: 115 

All the gifts from all the heights, your own. Love ! 

XIII 

Yet a semblance of resource avails us — 

Shade so finely touched, love's sense must seize it. 

Take these lines, look lovingly and nearly. 

Lines I write the first time and the last time. 120 

He who works in fresco, steals a hair-brush, 

Curbs the liberal hand, subservient proudly. 

Cramps his spirit, crowds its all in little, 

Makes a strange art of an art familiar. 

Fills his lady's missal-marge with flowerets. 125 

He who blows through bronze, may breathe through silver. 

Fitly serenade a slumbrous princess. 

He v/ho writes, may write for once as I do. 

XIV 

Love, you saw me gather men and women, 

Live or dead or fashioned by my fancy, 130 

Enter each and all, and use their service, 

Speak fromi every mouth,— the speech, a poem. 



72 ONE WORD MORE 

Hardly shall I tell my joys and sorrows, 

Hopes and fears, belief and disbelievino-: 

I am mine and yours — the rest be all men's, 135 

Karshish, Cleon, Norbert, and the fifty. 

Let me speak this once in my true person, 

Not as Lippo, Roland, or Andrea, 

Though the fruit of speech be just this sentence: 

Pray you, look on these my men and women, 140 

Take and keep my fifty poems finished; 

Where my heart lies, let my brain lie also ! 

Poor the speech; be how I speak, for all things. 

XV 

Not but that you know me ! Lo, the moon's self! 

Here in London, yonder late in Florence, 145 

Still we find her face, the thrice-transfigured. 

Curving on a sky imbrued with color, 

Drifted over Fiesole by twilight. 

Came she, our new crescent of a hair's-breadth. 

Full she flared it, lamping Samminiato, 150 

Rounder 'twixt the cypresses and rounder, 

Perfect till the nightingales applauded. 

Now, a piece of her old self, impoverished. 

Hard to greet, she traverses the house-roofs, 

Hurries with unhandsome thrift of silver, 155 

Goes dispiritedly, glad to finish. 

XVI 
What, there's nothiiig in the moon noteworthy ? 
Nay: for if that moon could love a mortal. 
Use, to charm him (so to fit a fancy). 
All her magic ('t is the old sweet mythos), 160 

736. Karshish. etc. These and the names two hnes below are characters in his 
poems. 

148. Fiesole. A town on a hill above Florence, 

150. Samminiato. In Florence. 

160. Mythos, of the mortal whom Diana lov^d. 



ONE WORD MORE 73 

She would turn a new side to her mortal, 

Side unseen of herdsman, huntsman, steersman — 

Blank to Zoroaster on his terrace, 

Blind to Galileo on his turret, 

Dumb to Homer, dumb to Keats — him, even ! 165 

Think, the wonder of the moonstruck mortal — 

When she turns round, comes again in heaven, 

Opens out anew for worse or better ! 

Proves she like some portent of an iceberg 

Swimming full upon the ship it founders, 170 

Hungry with huge teeth of splintered crystals? 

Proves she as the paved work of a sapphire 

Seen by Moses when he climbed the mountain ? 

Moses, Aaron, Nadab and Abihu 

Climbed and saw the very God, the Highest, 175 

Stand upon the paved work of a sapphire. 

Like the bodied heaven in his clearness 

Shone the stone, the sapphire of that paved work. 

When they ate and drank and saw God also ! 

X\1I 

What were seen ? None knows, none ever shall know. 180 

Only this is sure — the sight were other, 

Not the moon's same side, born late in Florence, 

Dying now impoverished here in London. 

God be thanked, the meanest of his creatures 

Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with, 185 

One to show a woman when he loves her ! 

XVIII 

This I say of me, but think of you, Love ! 
This to you — yourself my moon of poets ! 

163. Zoroaster Founder of the ancient Persian religion. 

164. Galileo ( 1564- 1642). An Italian astronomer. 

174. Aaron, Nadab, Abihu. See Exodus vi and xxviii. 



74 ONE WORD MORE 

Ah, but that's the world's side, there's the wonder, 

Thus they see you, praise you, think they know you ! 190 

There, in turn I stand with them and praise you — 

Out of my own self, I dare to phrase it. 

But the best is when I glide from out them, 

Cross a step or two of dubious twilight. 

Come out on the other side, the novel ^95 

Silent silver lights and darks undreamed of. 

Where I hush and bless myself with silence. 

XIX 

Oh, their Rafael of the dear Madonnas, 

Oh, their Dante of the dread Inferno, 

Wrote one song — and in my brain I sing it, 200 

Drew one angel — borne, see, on my bosom ! 



My Star. 

All that I know 

Of a certain star 
Is, it can throw 

(Like the angled spar) 
T^ow a dart of red, 5 

;N"ow a dart of bhie ; 
Till my friends have said 

They would fain see, too. 
My star that dartles the red and the blue ! 
Then it stops like a bird ; like a flower, hangs furled : lo 

They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it. 
What matter to me if their star is a world ? 

Mine has opened its soul to me ; therefore I love it. 



Incident of the French Camp. 



You know, we French stormed Ratisbon : 

A mile or so away 
On a little mound, Napoleon 

Stood on our storming-day ; 

2. A certain star.— The metaphor of this suggestive little poem is thus 
interpreted by Mrs. Orr, in her '* Handbook to Browning's ^Vorks" : ** ' 'Sly 
Scar ' may be taken as a tribute to the pei'sonal element in love ; the bright 
peculiar light in which the sympathetic soul reveals itself to the object of 
its sympathy ■" 

1. Katisbon. Or Regensbiirg:, a town on the Danube, 65 miles north of 
Munich, not fa»- f lom the river Isar. The '' incident" here described was au 
actual occurrence . 



12 BROWNING^S POEMS. 

With neck out-thrust, you fancy how, 5 

Legs wide, arms locked behind, 
As if to balance the prone brow 

Oppressive with its mind. 

Just as perhaps he mused ' ' My plans 

That soar, to earth may fall, 10 

Let once my army -leader Lannes 

Waver at yonder wall, " — 
Out 'twixt the battery -smokes there flew 

A rider, bound on bound 
Full-galloping ; nor bridle drew 1 5 

Until he reached the mound. 

Then off there flung in smiling joy, 

And held himself erect 
By just his horse's mane, a boy : 

You hardly could suspect — 2^^ 

(So tight he kept his lips compressed, 

Scarce any blood came through) 
You looked twice ere you saw his breast 

Was all but shot in two. 

** Well," cried he, " Emperor, by God's grace 25 

We've got you Ratisbon ! 
The Marshal's in the market-place, 

And you'll be there anon 
To see your flag-bird flap his vans 

Where I, to heart's desire, 30 

Perched him !" The chief's eye flashed ; his plans 

Soared up again like fire. 

n. M!y army-leader T^aiines. — Oue of Napoleon's most distinguished 
marshals. He commanded in the battles of ]Marengo. Austeiiitz, Jena, 
Friedland, and others. For winning the battle of JMontebello he was made 
Duke of Montebello. 

29. Vans.— From the French van, a wing. The wings of the imperial 
eagle upon the banner flap in the wind. 



FIOME THOUGHTS, FROM ABROAD. 13 

The chief's eye flashed ; but presently 

Softened itself, as sheathes 
A film the mother- eagle's eye 35 

When her bruised eaglet breathes ; 
'• You're wounded !" " Nay," the soldier's pride 

Touched t^ the quick, he said : 
*' I'm killed, Sire !" And his chief beside, 

Smiling the boy fell dead. 40 



Home Thoughts, from Abroad. 



Oh, to be in England now that April's there, 

And wiioever wakes in England sees, some morning, unaware. 

That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf 5 

Kound the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, 

While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough 

In England — now ! 

And after April, when May follows. 

And the white-throat builds, and all the swallows ! 

Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge 

Leans to the field and scatters on the clover 10 

Blossoms and dewdrops — at the bent spray's edge — 

That's the wise thrush: he sings each song twice over 

Lest you should think he never could recapture 

The first fine careless rapture ! 

And though the fields look rough with hoary dew, 15 

And will be gay when noontide wakes anew 

The buttercups, the little children's dower 

—Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower I 



14 

Rabbi ben Ezra. 



In Rabbi ben Ezra Mr. Browning hns crystallized his religious philosophy 
into a shape of abiding beauty. It has been called, not rashl}^ the noblest 
of modern religious poems. Alike in substance and in form it belongs tc 
the highest order of meditative poetry; and it has an almost unique quality 
of grave beauty, of severe restraint, of earnest and measured enthusiasm. 
This is one of those poems which can never be profitably analyzed or com 
mented on : it must be read. What the Psalm of Life is to the people who 
do not think. Rabbi ben Ezra might and should be to those who do: a light 
through the darkness— a lantern of guidance and a beacon of hope — to the 
wanderers lost and weary in the selva selvaggia. It is one of those poems 
that mold character. 

Grow old along with me ! 

The best is yet to be, 

The last of life, for which the first was made : 

Our times are in His hand 

Who saith, *' A whole I planned, 5 

Youth shows but half ; trust God : see all, nor be afraid !" 

Not that, amassing flowers, 

Youth sighed, *' Which rose make ours. 

Which lily leave and then as best recall ?" 

Not that, admiring stars, 10 

It yearned, ' ' Nor Jove, nor Mars ; 

Mine be some figured flame which blends, transcends them all!' 

Not for such hopes and fears 

Annulling youth's brief years. 

Do I remonstrate : folly wide the mark ! 15 

Rather I prize the doubt 

Low kinds exist without. 

Finished and finite clods, untroubled by a spark. 

2. The best is yet to be.— The poet expresses the thought in "Saul" 
thus: 

" By the spirit, when age shall overcome thee, thou still shalt enjoy 
More indeed, than at first when inconscious, the life of a boy/' 



RABBI BEN EZRA. 15 

Poor vaunt of life indeed, 

Were man but formed to feed 20 

On joy, to solely seek and find and feast ; 
Such feasting ended, then 
As sure an end to men ; 

Irks care the crop-full bird ? Frets doubt the maw-crammed 
beast ? 

Kejoice we are allied 25 

To That which doth provide 

And not partake, effect and not receive ! 

A spark disturbs our clod; 

!N"earer we hold of God 

Who gives, than of His tribes that take, I must believe. 30 

Then, welcome each rebuff 

That turns earth's smoothness rough, 

Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go ! 

Be our joys three-parts pain! 

Strive, and hold cheap the strain; 35 

Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe ! 

For thence, — a paradox 

Which comforts while it mocks, — 

Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail: 

What I aspired to be, 40 

And was not, comforts me: 

A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale. 

What is he but a brute 
Whose flesh hath soul to suit, 

24. Irks care, etc.— Care does not annoy, nor doubt fret, the well-fed 
bird or beast. 

29 Nearer we hold of God.— "We possess the right or title to a nearer 
relationship with God. 

40, 41.— In *' Saul '' the poet says: " 'tis not what man Does which exalts 
him, but what man Would do." 



16 

Whose spirit works lest arms and legs want play ? 45 

To man, propose this test — 

Thy body at its best, 

How far can that project thy soul on its lone way ? 

Vet gifts should prove their use: 

1 own the Past profuse 50 

Of power each side, perfection every turn: 

Eyes, ears took in their dole, 

Brain treasured up the w^hole: 

Should not the heart beat once " How good to live and learn " ? 

Not once beat '* Praise be Thine ! 55 

I see the whole design, 

I, wiio saw Powder, see now Love perfect too: 

Perfect I call Thy plan: 

Thanks that I w^as a man ! 

Maker, remake, complete, — I trust Avhat Thou shalt do 1" 60 

For pleasant is this flesh; 

Our soul, in its rose-mesh 

Pulled ever to the earth, still yearns for rest: 

Would we some prize might hold 

To match those manifold 65 

Possessions of the brute, — gain most, as we did best ! 

Let us not always say 

*' Spite of this flesh to-day 

I strove, made head, gained ground upon the w^hole !" 

As the bird wings and sings, 70 

Let us cry ^' All good things 

Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!" 

Therefore I summon age 
To grant youth's heritage, 

52. Dole.— Share, that which is dealt. 



RABBI BEN EZRA, 17 

Liie's struggle having so far reached its term: 75 

Thence shall I pass, approved 

A man, for aye removed 

From the developed brute; a God though in the germ. 

And I shall thereupon 

Take rest, ere I be gone 80 

Once more on my adventure brave and new: 

Fearless and unperplexed, 

When I wage battle next, 

What weapons to select, what armor to indue. 

Youth ended, I shall try 85 

My gain or loss thereby; 

Leave the fire ashes, what survives is gold: 

And I shall weiga the same, 

Give life its praise or blame: 

Young, all lay in dispute; I shall know, being old. 90 

For, note when evening shuts, 

A certain moment cuts 

The deed off, calls the glory from the gray: 

A whisper from the west 

Shoots — " Add this to the rest, 95 

Take it and try its worth: here dies another day." 

So, still within this life, 

Though lifted o'er its strife. 

Let me discern, compare, pronounce at last, 

'' This rage was right i' the main, 100 

That acquiescence vain: 

The Future I may face now I have proved the Past." 

For more is not reserved 

To man, with soul just nerved 



75. Jts term.— Its terminus, proper end or limit, 



18 bkowning's poems. 

To act to-morrow what he learns to-day : 105 

Here, work enough to watch 

The Master work, and catch 

Hints of the proper craft, tricks of the tooTs true play. 

As it was better, youth 

Should strive, through acts uncouth, iic 

Toward making, than repose on aught found made : 

So, better, age, exempt 

From strife, should know, than tempt 

Further. Thou waitedst age : wait death, nor be afraid ! 

Enough now, if the Right 1 1 5 

And Good and Infinite 

Be named here, as thou callest thy hand thine own, 

With knowledge absolute, 

Subject to no dispute 

From fools that crowded youth, nor let thee feel alone. 120 

Be there, for once and all, 

Severed great minds from small, 

Announced to each his station in the Past ! 

Was I, the world arraigned, 

Were they, my soul disdained, 125 

Right ? Let age speak the truth and give us peace at last ! 

Now, who shall arbitrate ? 

Ten men love what I hate, 

Shun what I follow, slight what I receive; 

Ten, who in ears and eyes 130 

Match me: we all surmise, 

They, this thing, and I, that: whom shall my soul believe ? 

124, 125. Was I whom the world arraigued, or were they whom my sou 



RABBI BEN EZRA. 19 

^ot on the vulgar mass 

Called *' work," must sentence pass, 

Things done, that took the eye and had the priee^ 135 

O'er which, from level stand, 

The low worM laid its hand, 

Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice: 

But all, the world's coarse thumb 

And finger failed to plumb, 140 

So passed in making up the main account: 

All instincts immature, 

All purposes unsure, 

That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount: 

Thoughts hardly to be packed 145 

Into a narrow act, 

Fancies that broke through language and escaped: 

All I could never be, 

All men ignored in me, 

This I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped. 150 

Ay, note that Potter's wheel, 

That metaphor ! and feel 

"Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay, — 

Thou, to w^hom fools propound. 

When the wine makes its round, 155 

*' Since life fleets, all is change; the Past gone, seize to-day 1" 

Fool ! All that is, at all, 

Lasts ever, past recall ; 

Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure : 

What entered into thee, 160 

Tliat was, is, and shall be : 

Time's wheel runs back or stops : Potter and clay endure. 

152. That metaplior.— Compare the same metaphor, Is. J^iv, 3 ^ud 
^xix. IC: Jer. xviii. :^-6; Rom. ix, %%. 



20 browning's poems. 

He fixed thee mid this dance 

Of plastic circumstance, 

This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest : 165 

Machinery just meant 

To give thy soul its bent. 

Try thee, and turn thee forth sufficiently impressed. 

What though the earlier grooves 

Which ran the laughing loves 1 70 

Around thy base, no longer pause and press ? 

What though, about thy rim. 

Skull- things in order grim 

Grow out, in graver mood, obey the sterner stress ? 

Look not thou down but up ! 175 

To uses of a cup. 

The festal board, lamp's flash, and trumpet's peal, 
The new wine's foaming flow. 
The Master's lips aglow ! 

Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what needst thou witli 
earth's wheel ? 1 80 

But I need, now as then. 

Thee, God, who moldest men ! 

And since, not even while the whirl was worst, 

Did I, — to the wheel of life 

With shapes and colors rife, 185 

Bound dizzily, — mistake my end, to slake Thy thirst: 

So, take and use Thy work, 

Amend what flaws may lurk, 

What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim ! 

My times be in Thy hand ! 1 90 

Perfect the cup as planned ! 

Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same 1 



MEMORABILIA. 21 



Memorabilia. 



This poem, says Mrs. Orr, " is a picturesque comment on the power of 
personal association to give importance to any incident, however trifling ; 
and tends to show that, from this point of view, no incident is more trifling 
than another." The enthusiastic lover of Shelley has so idealized the poet 
that he can hardly believe him to be a man that can be spoken to like other 
men. For him a faUing eagle feather, with its sudden suggestion of the 
ethereal poet, is enough to drive away all other memories of the moor. 

Ah, did you once see Shelley plain, 
And did he stop and speak to you, 

And did you speak to him again ? 
How strange it seems, and new ! 

But you were living before that, 

And also you are living after ; 
And the memory I started at — 

My starting moves your laughter ! 

I crossed a moor, with a name of its own 
And a certain use in the world, no doubt, lo 

Yet a hand's-breadth of it shines alone 
'Mid the blank miles round about : 

For there I picked up on the heather 

And there I put inside my breast 
A moulted feather, an eagle-feather ! 15 

Well, I forget the rest. 



22 BROWNING S POEMS. 



Abt Vogler. 

(After he has been extemporizing upon the Musical 
Instrument of his Invention.) 



AM Vogler"^ is an utterance on music which exceeds every attempt that 
has ever been made in verse to set forth the secret of the most sacred and 
illusive of the arts. Only the wonderful lines in the Merchant of I'euke 
come anywhere near it. It is the richest, deepest, fuUest poem on music in 
the language. The wonder and beauty of it grow on one, as the wonder and 
beauty of a sky, of the sea, of a landscape, beautiful indeed and wondi. rful 
from the first, become momentarily more evident, intense and absorbing. 
Life, rehgion, and music— the Gcoizen, Giiten. Schonen of existence— are 
combined in threefold unity, apprehended and interpreted in their essential 
spirit. 

Would that the structure brave, the manifold music I build, 

Bidding my organ obey, calling its keys to their work. 
Claiming each slave of the sound, at a touch, as when Solo- 
mon willed 
Armies of angels that soar, legions of demons that lurk, 
Man, brute, reptile, fly, — alien of end and of aim, 5 

Adverse, each from the other heaven-high, hell-deep re- 
moved, — 
Should rush into sight at once as he named the ineffable Name, 
And pile him a palace sti-aight, to pleasure the princess he 
loved ! 

Would it might tarry like his, the beautiful building of mine, 

This which my keys in a crowd pressed and importuned to 

raise ! 10 

Ah, one and all, how they helped, would dispart now and now 

combine. 

Zealous to hasten the work, heighten their master his praise ! 

* The Abt or Abbe George Joseph Yogler (born at Wurzburg, Bavaria, in 
1749, died at Darmstadt, 1824) \/asa composer, professor, kapellmeister, and 
writer on music. Among his pupils were Weber and Meyerbeer. The 
*' musical instrument of bis invention" was called an orchestrion. " It was," 
says Sir G. Grove, "a very compact organ, in which four keyboards of five 
octaves each, and a pedaf board of thirty-six keys, with swell complete, were 
packed into a cube of nine feet." 

3. As when Solomon willed.— The reference is to legends of the Koran, 
which attribute to Solomon tt z possession of magical powers. 



ABT TOGLER. 23 

And one would bury his brow with a bhnd plunge down to hell, 
Burrow a while and build, broad on the roots of things. 

Then up again swim into sight, having based me my palace well, 
Founded it, fearless of flame, flat on the nether springs. i6 

And another w^ould mount and march, like the excellent minion 
he was. 
Ay, another and yet another, one crowd but with many a 
crest. 
Raising my rampired walls of gold as transparent as glass, 

Eager to do and die, yield each his place to the rest : 20 

For higher still and higher (as a runner tips with fire. 
When a great illumination surprises a festal night — 
Outlining round and round Rome's dome from space to spire) 
Up, the pinnacled glory reached, and the pride of my soul 
was in sight. 

In sight ? [N'ot half ! for it seemed, it was certain, to match 
man's birth, 25 

l^ature in turn conceived, obeying an impulse as I ; 
And the emulous heaven yearned down, made effort to reach 
the earth, 
As the earth had done her best, in my passion, to scale the 
sky: 
Novel splendors burst forth, grew familiar and dwelt with mine, 
Not a point nor peak but found, but fixed its wandering 
star ; 30 

Meteor-moons, balls of blaze : and they did not pale nor pine, 
For earth had attained to heaven, there was no more near 
nor far. 



25-40. '* Verses four and five are a bold attempt to describe the indescrib- 
able, to shadow forth that strange state of clairvoyance when the soul shakes 
itself free from all external impressions, which Vogel tells us was the case 
with Schubert, and which is true of all great composers—' whether in the 
body or out of the body, I cannot say.' " — Mrs. Turnhull: Browning Soc, 
Papers, Pt, IV. 



24 

Xay more ; for there wanted not who walked in the glare and 

glow, 33 

Presences plain in the i)lace ; or, fresh from the Protoplast, 

Furnished for ages to come, when a kindlier wind should blow. 

Lured now to begin and live, in a house to their liking at last ; 

Or else the wonderful Dead who have passed through the 

body and gone. 

But were back once more to breathe in an old world worth 

their new : 

^hat never had been, was now ; what was, as it shall be anon; 

And what is,— shall I say, matched both? for I was made 

perfect too. 40 

All through my keys that gave their sounds to a wish of my 
soul. 
All through my soul that praised as its wish flowed visibly 
forth. 
All through music and me ! For think, had I painted the whole, 
AVhy, there it had stood, to see, nor the process so wonder- 
worth. 
Had I written the same, made verse — still, effect proceeds 
from cause, 45 

Ye know why the forms are fair, ye hear how the tale ia 
told ; 
It is all triumphant art, but art in obedience to laws. 
Painter and poet are proud, in the artist-list enrolled : — 

But here is the finger of God, a flash of the wall that can, 49 
Existent behind all laws : that made them, and, lo, they are ! 



34. Protoplast. — " The original ; the thing first foniied as a copy to be 
imitated." 

49. I5ut here is the fiiig:er of God —The other arts are "triumphant," 
but are only "art in obedience to laws ;" the effects of music are allied to 
the miraculous. 

" There is no sound in nature," says Schopenhauer, " fit to serve the mu- 
sirian as a model, or to supply him with more than an occasional suggestion 
for his sublime purpose. Heapproaches the original sources of existence 
more closely than all other artists, nay, even than Mature herself." 



ABT VOGLER. 25 

And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man. 
That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a 

star. 
Consider it well : each tone of our scale in itself is naught ; 
It is everywhere in the world — loud, soft, and all is said : 
Give it to me to use ! I mix it with two in my thought, 55 
And, there ! Ye have heard and seen : consider and bow 
the head ! 

Well, it is gone at last, the palace of music I reared ; 

Gone ! and the good tears start, the praises that come too 
slow; 
For one is assured at first, one scarce can say that he feared, 

That he even gave it a thought, the gone thing was to go. 
Never to be again ! But many more of the kind 61 

As good, nay, better perchance: is this your comfort to me? 
To me, who must be saved because I cling with my mind 

To the same, same self, same love, same God : ay, what was, 
shall be. 

Therefore to whom turn I but to thee, the ineffable Name ? 

Builder and maker, thou, of houses not made with hands I 
What, have fear of change from thee who art ever the same ? 
Doubt that thy power can fill the heart that thy power ex- 
pands ? 
There shall never ])e one lost good ! What was, shall live as 
before ; 
The evil is null, is naught, is silence implying sound ; 70 
What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much good 
more ; 
On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round. 

All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good, shall exist ; 

Not its semblance, but itself ; no beauty, nor good, nor power 
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist. 

When eternity affirms the conception of an hour. 76 



26 brow:s"ing's poems. 

The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, 
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky, 

Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard ; 

Enough that he heard it once : we shall hear it by-and-by. 

And what is our failure here but a triumph's evidence 8i 

For the fullness of the days ? Have we withered or agonized ? 
Why else was the pause prolonged but that singing might issue 
thence ? 

Why rushed the aiscords in, but that harmony should be 
prized ? 
Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear, 85 

Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal and woe : 
But God has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear ; 

The rest may reason and welcome ; 'tis we musicians know. 

Well, it is earth with me ; silence resumes her reign : 

I will be patient and proud, and soberly acquiesce. 90 

Give me the keys. I feel for the common chord again, 

Sliding by semitones, till I sink to the minor, — yes, 
And I blunt it into a ninth, and I stand on alien ground. 

Surveying a while the heights I rolled from into the deep ; 
Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting-place is 
found, 95 

The C Major of this life : so, now I will try to sleep. 



The Lost Leader. 



The Lost Leader was originally written in reference to Wordsworth's 
abandonment of the Liberal cause, with perhaps a thought of Southey, but 
it is applicable to any popular apostasy. This is one of those songs that do 
the work of swords. It shows how easily Mr. Browning, had he so chosen, 
could have stirred the national feeling with his lyrics. 

Just for a handful of silver he left us. 

Just for a riband to stick in his coat — 
Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us, 

Lost all the others, she lets us devote ; 



THE LOST LEADER. 27 

They, with the gold to give, doled him out silver, 5 

So much was theirs who so little allowed : 
How all our copper had gone for his service ! 
Rags — were they purple, his heart had been proud ! 
We that had loved Mm so, followed him, honored him, 

Lived in his mild and magnificent eye, 10 

Learned his great language, caught his clear accents, 

Made him our pattern to live and to die ! 
Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us, 

Burns, Shelley, were with us, — they watch from their 
graves ! 
He alone breaks from the van and the freemen, 1 5 

He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves ! 

"We shall march prospering, — not through his presence ; 

Songs may inspirit us, — not from his lyre ; 
Deeds will be done, — while he boasts his quiescence, 

Still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire : 20 

Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more, 

One task more declined, one more footpath untrod, 
One more devils'-triumph and sorrow for angels, 

One wrong more to man, one more insult to God ! 
Life's night begins : let him never come back to us ! 25 

There would be doubt, hesitation and pain, 
Forced praise on our part — ^the glimmer of twilight, 

IsTever glad confident morning again ! 
Best fight on well, for we taught him — strike gallantly, 

Menace our heart ere we master his own ; 30 

Then let him receive the new knowledge and w^ait us, 

Pardoned in heaven, the first by the throne I 



06 BliOWNING^S POEMS. 

Andrea Del Sarto. 
[Called ^' The Faultless Painter."] 



Andrea del Srirto is a "translation into song" of the picture ca'Ic^l 
Andrea del Sarto and his Wife," now in the Pitti Palace. Florence. It i a 
perfect re-creation of the Ancu-ea described by Vasari, whose story is oije 
oc" the saddest in the records of art. ihe story is well known : how th^ 
painter, who at one time seemed as if be might h9\'e competed with 
Kaphael, was rained, as artist and as man, by his beautiful soulless wife, 
the fatal Lucrezia del Fede : and bow, led and lured by her. he outraged 
his conscience, lowered his ideal, and. losing all heart and hope, sank into 
the cold correctness, the unerring fluency, the uniform, melancholy repeti- 
tion of a single type— his wife's — which distinguish his later works. Mr. 
Browning has taken his facts from Vasari, and he has taken them quite 
Uterally. But what a change, what a transformation and transfiguration I 
No more absolutely creative work has been done in our days ; few more 
beautiful and pathetic poems written. The mood of sad, wistful, hopeless 
mournfulness of resignation which the poem expresses is a somewhat rare 
one with Mr. Browning's vivid and vivacious genius. It is an autumn twi- 
iight piece. The very movement of the hues, their very tone and touch, 
contribute to the effect. A single clear impression is made to result from 
an infinity of the minutest and scarcely appreciable touches : how fine 
these touches are, how clear the impression, can only be hinted at in words, 
can be realized only by a loving and scrupulous study. 

But do not let us quarrel am^ more, 

Xo, my Lucrezia ! bear with me for once : 

Sit down and all shall happen as you wish. 

You turn your face, but does it bring your heart ? 

I'll work then for your friend's friend, never fear, 5 

Treat his own subject after his own way, 

Fix his own time, accept too his own price, 

And shut the money into this small hand 

AYhen next it takes mine. Will it ? tenderly ? 

Oh, ril content him, — but to-morrow^, Love I 10 

I often am much wearier than you think, 

This evening more than usual : and it seems 

As if — forgive now — shoukl you let me sit 

Here by the window, with your hand in mine, 

And look a half hour forth on Fiesole, 15 

15. Fiesole [fes'o-le] — The ancient Frp<inlce, a town 3 miles N. E. of Flor- 
ence, on a steep hill, commanding a magnificent view of the Amo valley. 



ANDREA DEL SARTO. 29 

Both of one Tnind, as married people use, 

Quietly, quietly the evening through, 

I might get up to-morrow to my work 

Cheerful and fresh as ever. Let us try. 

To-morrow, how you shall be glad for this ! 20 

Your soft hand is a woman of itself. 

And mine, the man's bared breast she curls inside. 

Don't count the time lost, neither ; you must serve 

For each of the five pictures we require : 

It saves a model. So ! keep looking so— 25 

My serpentining beauty, rounds on rounds ! 

How could you ever prick those perfect ears. 

Even to put the pearl there ! oh, so sweet— 

My face, my moon, my everybody's moon, 

Which everybody looks on and calls his, S'^ 

And, I suppose, is looked on by in turn. 

While she looks— no one's : very dear, no less. 

You smile ? why, there's my picture ready made, 

There's what we painters call our harmony! 
A comm.on grayness silvers every thing, — 35 

All in a twilight, you and I alike 
—You, at the point of your first pride in me 
(That's gone, you know)— but I, at every point ; 
My youth, my hope, my art, being all toned down 
To yonder sober pleasant Fiesole. 4^ 

There's the bell clinking from the chapel-top ; 
That length of convent-wall across the way 
Holds the trees safer, huddled more inside ; 
The last monk leaves the garden ; days decrease, 
And autumn grows, autumn in every thing. 45 

Eh ? the whole seems to fall into a shape. 
As if I saw alike my work and self 
And all that I was born to be and do, 
A twilight-piece. T.ove, we are in God\s hand. 
" 16. 4§ ifjarrjed people use^ i.e., ou^ht, or are wont to b^, 



so 

How strange now looks the life he makes us lead ; 50 

So free we seem, so fettered fast we are ! 

I feel he laid the fetter : let it lie ! 

This chamber, for example — turn your head — 

All that's behind us ! You don't understand 

Nor care to understand about my art, ^5 

But you can hear at least when people speak : 

And that cartoon, the second from the door 

— It is the thing. Love ! so such things should be : 

Behold Madonna !— I am bold to say. 

I can do with my pencil w^hat I know, 60 

What I see, what at bottom of my heart 

I wish for, if I ever wish so deep — 

Do easily, too — when I say, perfectly. 

I do not boast, perhaps : yourself are judge, 

Who listened to the Legate's talk last week ; 65 

And just as much they used to say in France. 

At any rate 'tis easy, all of it ! 

No sketches first, no studies, that's long past : 

I do what many dream of, all their lives, 

— Dream ? strive to do, and agonize to do, 70 

And fail in doing. I could count twenty such 

On twice your fingers, and not leave this town. 

Who strive — you don't know how the others strive 

To paint a little thing like that you smeared 

Carelessly passing with your robes afloat, — • 75 

Yet do much less, so much less. Someone says, 

(I know his name, no matter) — so much less ! 

Well, less is more, Lucrezia : I am judged. 

There burns a truer light of God in them, 

66.— Andrea del Sarto was summoned to the coiu-t of Francis I. of France, 
where his painting was highly honored and handsomely remunerated. 
I^rged by the letters from his wife, he obtained permission of the king to re- 
visit Florence, on condition of a speedy return to his work ; but he broke his 
pledges, and with a sum of money with which his royal patron had intrusted 
liim for the purchase of works of art, built the "melancholy little bouse" 
il. ^12 j, to please the soulless Lucre?ia, ^ " 



ANDREA DEL SARTO. 31 

In their vexed beating stuffed and stopped-up brain, 80 

Heart, or whate'er else, than goes on to prompt 

This low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand of mine. 

Their works drop groundward, but themselves, I know, 

Reach many a time a heaven that's shut to me, 

Enter and take tlieir place there sure enough, 85 

Though they come back and cannot tell the world. 

My works are nearer heaven, but I sit here. 

The sudden blood of these men ! at a word — 

Praise them, it boils, or blame them, it boils too. 

I, painting from myself and to myself, 90 

Know what I do, am unmoved by men's blame 

Or their praise either. Somebody remarks 

Morello's outline there is wrongly traced, 

His hue mistaken ; what of that ? or else, 

Rightly traced and well ordered ; what of that ? 95 

Speak as they please, what does the mountain care ? 

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, 



82. L.ow-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand.—" Andrea del Sarto's 
was, after all, but the 'low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand,' and there- 
fore his perfect art does not touch oiu* hearts like that of Fra Bartolommeo, 
who occupies about the same position with regard to the great masters of the 
century as Andrea del Sarto. Fra Bartolommeo spoke from his heart. He 
was moved by the spirit, so to speak, to express his pure and holy thoughts 
in beautiful language, and the ideal that presented itself to his mind, and 
from which he, equally with Raphael, worked, approached almost as closely 
as Raphael's to that abstract beauty after which they both longed. Andrea 
del Sarto had no such longing : he was content with the loveliness of earth. 
This he could understand and imitate in its fullest perfection, and therefore 
he troubled himself but little about the ' wondrous paterne ' laid up in heaven. 
Many of his Madonnas have greater beauty, strictly spealdng, than those of 
Bartolommeo, or even of Raphael : but we miss in them that mysterious 
spiritual loveliness that gives the latter their chief charm." — Heaton's His- 
torji of Pointing. 

9.3. Morello.— The highest spur of the Apennines to the north of Florence 

96. What does the mountain care? — It is beyond their criticism. 

97. A man's reach should exceed his grasp. — " The true glory of art 
is, that in its creation there arise desires and aspirations never to be satis- 
fied on earth, but generating new desires and new aspirations, by which the 
spirit of man mounts to God himself. The artist (Mr. Browning' loves to in- 
sist on this point) who can realize in marble, or in color, or in music, his ideal, 
has thereby missed the highest gain of art. In ' Pippa Passes ' the regenera- 
tion of the young sculptor's work turns on his finding that in the very per- 
fection which he bad attained lies ultimate failure. And one entire poem, 
' Andrea del Sarto,' has been devoted to the exposition of this thought, ^n* 



32 

Or what's a heaven for ? All is silver-gray, 

Placid and perfect with my art : the worse ! 

I know botli what I want and what might gain ; ioq 

And yet how profitless to know, to sigh 

" Had I been two, another and myself. 

Our head would have overlooked the world !" No doubt. 

Yonder's a work now, of that famous youth 

The Urbinate who died five years ago. 105 

('Tis copied, George Vasari sent it me.) 

Well, I can fancy how he did it all. 

Pouring his soul, with kings and popes to see, 

Reaching, that heaven might so replenish him, 

Above and through his art — for it gives way ; no 

That arm is wrongly put — and there again — 

A fault to pardon in the drawing's lines. 

Its body, so to speak : its soul is right. 

He means right — that, a child may understand. 

Still, what an arm ! and I could alter it : 115 

But all the play, the insight and the stretch — 

Out of me, out of me ! And wherefore out ? 

Had you enjoined them on me, given me soul, 

We might have risen to Rafael, I and you. 
• IN'ay, Love, you did give all I asked, I think — 120 

More than I merit, yes, by many times. 
• But had you — oh, with the same perfect brow. 

And perfect eyes, and more tlian perfect mouth, 

And the low voice my soul hears, as a bird 

The fowler's pipe, and follows to the snare — 1 2 5 

drea is ' the faultless painter; ' no line of liis drawing ever ^oes astray: his 
hand expresses adequately and accurately all that bis mind conceives; but 
for this very reason, precisely because he is ' the faultless painter,' his work 
lacks the highest qualities of art." — Professor Doinfen. 

105-117. Tlie Urbinate. -Raphael Santi. born in Urbino, 1483. Though 
Andrea knows that Raphael is inferior to himself in technique, yei he ac- 
knoM'ledfjres him to be his superior, because he reaches " above and through 
his art" toward heaven and thincrs divine. 

106 Geortre Vasari.— Friend and pupil of Michael Angelo and Andrea 
(iel Barto, aud author of " Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects," 



ANDREA DEL SARTO. 33 

Had you, with these the same, but brought a mind ! 
Some women do so. Had the mouth there urged 
* God and the glory ! never care for gain. 
The present by the future, what is that ? 
Live for fame, side by side with Agnolo ! 130 

Rafael is waiting : up to God, all three !" 
I might have done it for you. So it seems : 
i^erhaps not. All is as God over-iules. 
Beside, incentives come from the soul's self ; 
The rest avail not. Why do I need you ? 135 

What w ife had Rafael, or has Agnolo ? 
In this world, who can do a thing, w ill not ; 
And who would do it, cannot, I perceive : 
Yet the will's somewhat — somewhat, too, the power — 
And thus we half-men struggle. At the end, 140 

God, I conclude, compensates, punishes. 
'Tis safer for me, if the award be strict. 
That I am something underrated here. 
Poor this long while, despised, to speak the truth. 
I dared not, do you know^, leave home all day, 145 

For fear of chancing on the Paris lords. 
The best is w^hen they pass and look aside ; 
But they speak sometimes ; I must bear it all. 
Well may they speak ! That Francis, that first time. 
And that long festal year at Fontainebleau ! 1 50 

I surely then could sometimes leave the ground, 
Put on the glory, Rafael's daily wear. 
In that humane great monarch's golden look, — 
One finger in his beard or twisted curl 
Over his mouth's good mark that made the smile, 155 

One arm about my shoulder, round my neck, 
The jingle of his gold chain in my ear, 

129. By the future, i.e., in comparison with the future. 

130. Agnolo — Michael Angelo (or Michel Agnolo) Buonarotti. 
146. For fear, etc.— See note on 1. 66, 



34 browning's poems. 

I painting proudly with his breath on me, 

All his court round him, seeing with his eyes, 

Such frank French eyes, and such a fire of souls i6o 

Profuse, my hand kept plying by those hearts, — 

And, best of all, this, this, this face beyond, 

This in the background, waiting on my work, 

To crown the issue with a last reward ! 

A good time, was it not, my kingly days ? 165 

And had you not grown restless. . . but I know — 

'Tis done and past ; 'twas right, my instinct said ; 

Too live the life grew, golden and not gray : 

And I'm the weak-eyed bat no sun should tempt 

Out of the grange whose four walls make this world. 170 

How could it end in any other way ? 

You called me, and I came home to your heart. 

The triumph was, to have ended there ; then, if 

I reached it ere the triumph, what is lost ? 

Let my hands frame your face in your hair's gold, 175 

You beautiful Lucrezia that are mine ! 

" Kafael did this, Andrea painted that ; 

The Koman's is the better when you pray, 

But still the other's Virgin was his wife" — 

Men will excuse me. I am glad to judge 180 

Both pictures in your presence , clearer grows 

My better fortune, I resolve to think. ' 

For, do you know^, Lucrezia, as God lives. 

Said one day Agnolo, his very self. 

To Rafael ... I have known it all these years ... 185 

(When the young man was flaming out his thoughts 

Upon a palace- wall for Rome to see. 

Too lifted up in heart oecause of it) 

'' Friend, there's a certain sorry little scrub 

173, 174. The triumph was, etc. --The real triumph was, to have ended 
in your lieart; that reached, the lesser triumph in P>aiice is uo loss. 
177-179. Raphael did this, etc.— The suppo&wl rcLaark of some critic. 



ANDREA DEL SARTO. 35 

Goes up and down our Florence, none cares how, 190 

Who, were he set to plan and execute 

As you are, pricked on by your popes and kings, 

Would bring the sweat into that brow of yours !" 

To Rafael's ! — And indeed the arm is wrong. 

I hardly dare . . . yet, only you to see, 195 

Give the chalk here— quick, thus the line should go ! 

Ay, but the soul I he's Rafael I rub it out ! 

Still, all I care for, if he spoke the truth, 

(What he ? why, who but Michel Agnolo ? 

Do you forget already words like those ?) 200 

If really there was such a chance so lost, — 

Is, whether you're — not grateful — but more pleased. 

Well, let me think so. And you smile indeed ! 

This hour has been an hour ! Another smile ? 

If you would sit thus by me every night 205 

I should work better, do you comprehend ? 

I mean that I should earn more, give you more. 

See, it is settled dusk now ; there's a star ; 

Morello's gone, the watch -lights show the wall, 

The cue-owls speak the name we call them by. 210 

Come from the window, Love,— come in, at last, 

Inside the melancholy little house 

We built to be so gay with. God is just. 

King Francis may forgive me : oft at nights 

When I look up from painting, eyes tired out, 215 

The walls become illumined, brick from brick 

Distinct, instead of mortar, fierce bright gold, 

That gold of his I did cement them with ! 

Let us but love each other. Must you go ? 

That cousin here again ? he waits outside ? 220 

Must see you — you, and not with me ? Those loans ? 

More gaming debts to pay ? you smiled for that ? 

Well, let smiles buy me ! have you more to spend ? 

While hand and eye and something of a heart 



36 browning's poems. 

Are left me, work's my ware, and what's it worth ? 225 

I'll pay my fancy. Only let me sit 

The gray remainder of the evening out, 

Idle, you call it, and muse perfectly 

How I could paint, were I but back in France, 

One picture, just one more — the Virgin's face, 230 

Not yours this time ! I want you at my side 

To hear them — that is, Michel Agnolo — 

Judge all I do and tell you of its worth. 

Will you ? To-morrow, satisfy your friend. 

I take the subjects for his corridor, 335 

Finish the portrait out of hand — there, there, 

And throw him in another thing or t\M0 

If he demurs ; the whole should prove enough 

To pay for this same cousin's freak. Beside, 

What's better and what's all I care about, 240 

Get you the thirteen scudi for the ruff ! 

Love, does that please you ? Ah, but what does he, 

The cousin ! what does he to please you more ? 

I am grown peaceful as old age to-night. 
I regret little, I would change still less. 245 

Since there my past life lies, why alter it ? 
The very wrong to Francis ! — it is true 
I took his coin, was tempted and complied, 
And built this house and sinned, and all is said. 
My father and my mother died of want. 250 

Well, had I riches of my own ? you see 
How one gets rich ! Let each one bear his lot. 
They were born poor, lived poor, and poor they died: 
And I have labored somewhat in my time 
And not been paid profusely. Some good son 255 

Paint my two hundred pictures — let him try ! 
No doubt, there's something strikes a balance. Yes, 
You love me quite enough, it seems to-night, 



GOOD NEWS FROM GHENT. 37 

This must suffice me here. What would one have ? 

In heaven, perhaps, new chances, one more chance — 260 

Four great walls in the New Jerusalem, 

Meted on each side by the angel's reed. 

For Leonard, Kafael, Agnolo, and me 

To cover — the three first without a wife, 

While I have mine ! So — still they overcome 265 

Because there's still Lucrezia, — as I choose. 

Again the cousin's whistle ! Go, my Love. 



' How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix." 

[16-.] 



The " good news'' of this stirring ballad is intended for that of the Pacifi- 
catioa of Ghent, a treaty of union entered into by Holland, Zealand, and 
the soulhern Netherlands against the tyrannical Philip 11., in 1576. The in- 
cident of the poem is not historical. "I wrote it," says Mr. Browning, " un- 
der the bulwark of a vessel off the African coast, after I had been at sea 
long enough to appreciate even the fancy of a gallop on the back of a cer- 
tain good norse ' York' then in my stable at home." 

I SPRANG to the stirrup, and Joris, and he ; 

I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three ; 

'' Good speed!" cned the watch, as the gate-bolts undrew ; 

"Speed!" echoed the wall to us galloping through ; 

Behind shut the postern, the lights sank to rest, 5 

And into the midnight we galloped abreast. 

Not a word to each other ; we kept the great pace 

Neck by neck, stride by stride, never changing our place ; 

I turned in my saddle and made its girths tight, 

Then shortened each stirrup, and set the pique right, 10 

Rebuckled the cheek-strap, chained slacker the bit, 

Nor galloped less steadily Roland a whit. 

263. I^eonard.— Leonardo da Vinci. 
10. Pique.— The pommel of the saddle. 



38 BROWNING S POEMS. 

'Twas moonset at starting ; but while we drew near 

Lokeren, the cocks crew and twilight dawned clear ; 

At Boom, a great yellow star came out to see ; 15 

At Diiffeld, 'twas morning as plain as could be ; 

And from Mecheln church-steeple we heard the half chime, 

So Joris broke silence with, " Yet there is time!'' 

At Aershot, up leaped of a sudden the sun, 

And against him the cattle stood black every one, 20 

To stare through the mist at us galloping past, 

And I saw my stout galloper Eoland at last. 

With resolute shoulders, each butting away 

The haze, as some bluff river headland its spray : 

And his low head and crest, just one sharp ear bent back 25 

For my voice, and the other pricked out on his track ; 

And one eye's black intelligence, —ever that glance 

O'er its white edge at me, his own master, askance ! 

And the thick heavy spume-flakes which aye and anon 

His fierce lips shook upwards in galloping on. 30 

By Hasselt, Dirck groaned ; and cried Joris, *' Stay spur!" 
Your Roos galloped bravely, the fault's not in her. 
We'll remember at Aix" — for one heard the quick wheeze 
Of her chest, saw the stretched neck and staggering knees. 
And sunk tail, and horrible heave of the flank, 35 

As down on her haunches she shuddered and sank. 

So we were left galloping, Joris and I, 

Past Looz and past Tongres, no cloud in the sky ; 

The broad sun above laughed a pitiless laugh, 

'Neath our feet broke the brittle bright stubble like chaff ; 40 

14. ILokeren.— This town and the others mentioned in the poem will be 
foimd upon any good map, in a general line from Ghent to Aix-la-Chapelle. 
The whole distance is about ninety miles. 

17. Mecheln.— The Flemish form of the more common French Malines. 



THE BOY AND THE ANGEL. 39 

Till over by Dalliem a dome-spire sprang white, 
And " Gallop," gasped Joris, " for Aix is in sight!" 

" How they'll greet us!" — and all in a moment his roan 

Kolled neck and croup over, lay dead as a stone ; 

And there was my Roland to bear the whole weight 45 

Of the news which alone could save Aix from her fate, 

With his nostrils like pits full of blood to the brim, 

And circles of red for his eye-sockets' rim. 

Then I cast loose my buff-coat, each holster let fall. 

Shook off both my jack-boots, let go belt and all, 50 

Stood up in the stirrup, leaned, patted his ear. 

Called my Eoland his pet-name, my horse without peer ; 

Clapi^ed my hands, laughed and sang, any noise, bad or good. 

Till at length into Aix Roland galloped and stood. 

And all I remember is, friends flocking round 55 

As I sat with his head 'twixt my knees on the ground ; 
And no voice but was praising this Roland of mine, 
As I poured down his throat our last measure of wine. 
Which (the burgesses voted by common consent) 
Was no more than his due who brought good news from 
Ghent. 60 



The Boy and the Angel. 



Morning, evening, noon and night, 
*^ Praise God!" sang Theocrite. 

Then to his poor trade he turned. 
Whereby the daily meal was earned. 



41. Dalhem.— Probably Dalheim, a town about midway between Ton- 
gres and Aix. 

46. Save Aix from her fate.— The reader is to imagine that Aix has 
resolved upon self-destruction, rather 4:han yield to the Spaniards. 



40 browning's poems. 

Hard he labored, long and well; 5 

O'er his work the boy's curls fell: 

But ever, at each period, 

He stopped and sang, " Praise God!'* 

Then back again his curls he threw, 

And cheerful turned to work anew. lo 

Said Blaise, the listening monk, ''Well done; 
I doubt not thou art heard, my son: 

' * As well as if thy voice to-day 

Were praising God the Pope's great way. 

'* This Easter Day, the Pope at Kome 15 

Praises God from Peter's dome." 

Said Theocrite, " Would God that I 

Might praise him, that great way, and die!" 

Night passed, day shone. 

And Theocrite was gone. 20 

With God a day endures alway, 
A thousand years are but a day. 

God said in heaven, *' Nor day nor night 
Now brings the voice of my delight." 

Then Gabriel, like a rainbow's birth, 25 

Spread his wings and sank to earth ; 

Entered, in flesh, the empty cell. 

Lived there, and played the craftsman well; 

And morning, evening, noon and night, 30 

Praised God in place of Theocrite. 



THE BOY AND THE ANGEL. 41 

And from a boy to youtl^ he grew: 
The man put off the stripling's hue: 

The man matured and fell away 
Into the season of decay: 

And ever o'er the trade he bent, 35 

And ever lived on earth content. 

(He did God's will ; to him, all one 
If on the earth or in the sun.) 

God said, *' A praise is in mine ear; 

There is no doubt in it, no fear: 40 

*^So sing old worlds, and so 

New worlds that from my footstool go. 

** Clearer loves sound other ways : 
I miss my little human praise. " 

Then forth sprang Gabriel's wings, off fell 45 

The flesh disguise, remained the cell. 

'Twas Easter Day : he flew to Kome, 
And paused above Saint Peter's dome. 

In the tiring-room close by 

The great outer gallery, 50 

With his holy vestments dight, 
Stood the new Pope, Theocrite: 

And all his past career 
Came back upon him clear. 



49. Tiring-room — The room where the " holy vestments" are kept, with 
which the priests and pope are dight," i.e., decked or attired. Shake- 
speare used the noun tire for attire. 



42 



Since when, a boy, he plied his trade, 55 

Till on his life the sickness weighed: 

And in his cell, when death drew near, 
An angel in a dream brought cheer: 

And rising from the sickness drear, 

He grew a priest, and now stood here. 60 

To the East with praise he turned. 
And on his sight the angel burned. 

"I bore thee from thy craftsman's cell. 
And set thee here; I did not well. 

** Vainly I left my angel-sphere, 65 

Vain was thy dream of many a year. 

*^ Thy voice's praise seemed weak; it dropped — 
Creation's chorus stopped ! 

*' Go back and praise again 

The early way, while I remain. 70 

'^ With that weak voice of our disdain, 
Take up creation's pausing strain. 

" Back to the cell and poor employ: 
Resume the craftsman and the boy !" 

Theocrite grew old at home; 75 

A new Pope dwelt in Peter's dome. 

One vanished as the other died: 
They sought God side by side. 



BY THE FIRESIDE. 4.') 



By the Fireside. 



How well I know what I mean to do 

When the long dark autumn evenings come ; 

And where, my soul, is thy pleasant hue ? 
With the music of all thy voices, dumb 

In life's November too ! S 

I shall be found by the fire, suppose. 

O'er a great wise book, as beseemeth age; 

While the shutters flap as the cross-wind blows, 
And I turn the page, and I turn the page, 

Not verse now, only prose! lo 

Till the young ones whisper, finger on lip, 

*' There he is at it, deep in Greek: 
Now then, or never, out we slip 

To cut from the hazels by the creek 
A mainmast for our ship !" 15 

I shall be at it indeed, my friends I 

Greek puts already on either side 
Such a branch-work forth as soon extends 

To a vista opening far and wide, 
And I pass out where it ends. 2c 

The outside frame, like your hazel-trees — 
But the inside-archway widens fast, 

And a rarer sort succeeds to these, 
And we slope to Italy at last 

And youth, by green degrees. 25 

3. Is. —The present with future meaning; "Where will be thy pleasant 
hue?'* 



44 browning's roEMS. 

I follow wherever I am led, 

Knowing so well the leader's hand: 
Oh woman-country, wooed not wed, 

Loved all the more by earth's male-lands, 
Laid to their hearts instead ! 30 

Look at the ruined chapel again 

Half-way up in the Alpine gorge ! 
Is that a tower, I point you plain, 

Or is it a mill, or an iron forge 
Breaks solitude in vain ? 35 

A turn, and we stand in the heart of things; 

The woods are round us, heaped and dim; 
From slab to slab how it slips and springs. 

The thread of water single and slim, 
Through the ravage some torrent brings 1 40 

Does it feed the little lake below ? 

That speck of white just on its marge 
Is Pella; see, in the evening-glow. 

How sharp the silver spear-heads charge 
When Alp meets heaven in snow ! 45 

On our other side is the straight-up rock; 

And a path is kept 'twixt the gorge and it 
By bowlder-stones, where lichens mock 

The marks on a moth, and small ferns fit 
Their teeth to the polished block. 50 

Oh the sense of the yellow mountain-flowers, 
And thorny balls, each three in one, 

The chestnuts throw on our path in showers ! 
For the drop of the woodland fruit's begun, 

These early November hours, 55 



BY THE FIRESIDE. 45 

That crimson the creeper's leaf across 

Like a splash of blood, intense, abrupt, 
O'er a shield else gold from rim to boss, 

And lay it for show on the fairy-cupped 
Elf -needled mat of moss, 60 

By the rose-flesli mushrooms, undivulged 
Last evening — nay, in to-day's first dew 

Yon sudden coral nipple bulged, 
Where a freaked fawn-colored flaky crew 

Of toad-stools peep indulged. 65 

And yonder, at foot of the fronting ridge 

That takes the turn to a range beyond. 
Is the chapel reached by the one-arched bridge, 

Where the water is stopped in a stagnant pond 
Danced over by the midge. 70 

The chapel and bridge are of stone alike. 

Blackish-gray and mostly wet ; 
Cut hemp-stalks steep in the narrow dike. 

See here again, how the lichens fret 
And the roots of the ivy strike ! 75 

Poor little place, where its one priest comes 

On a festa-day, if he comes at all, 
To the dozen folk from their scattered homes. 

Gathered within that precinct small 
By the dozen wa.ys one roams — 80 

To drop from the charcoal-burners' huts. 
Or climb from the hemp-dressers' low shed. 



73. Hemp - stalks steei).— Hemp that is soakirg in preparation for 
dressing. 

74. Fret.- -The lichens ornament, as with raised work. 



46 browning's poems. 

Leave the grange where the woodman stores his nuts, 

Or the wattled cote where the fowlers spread 
Their gear on the rock's bare juts. 85 

It has some pretension too, this front, 

With its bit of fresco half -moon-wise 
Set over the porch. Art's early wont : 

'Tis John in the Desert, I surmise, 
But has borne the weather's brunt — 9c 

Not from the fault of the builder, though, 

For a pent-house properly projects 
Where three carved beams make a certain show, 

Dating — good thought of our architect's — 
'Five, six, nine, he lets you know. 95 

And all day long a bird sings there, 
And a stray sheep drinks at the pond at times ; 

The place is silent and aware ; 

It has had its scenes, its joys and crimes, 

But that is its own affair. 100 

My perfect wife, my Leonor, 

Oh heart, my own. Oh eyes, mine too. 

Whom else could I dare look backward for. 
With whom beside should I dare pursue 

The path gray heads abhor ? 105 

For it leads to a crag's sheer edge with them ; 

Youth, flowery all the way, there stops — 
Not they ; age threatens and they contemn. 

Till they reach the gulf wherein youth drops. 
One inch from our life's safe hem ! no 

98. Aware.— Self -conscious. 

101. My T^eoiior.— The ''perfect wife," with the " ^reat brow" and the 
*' spirit-small band," can be no other than Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The 
poem, though in its circmmstances purely dramatic and imaginary, is auto- 
biograpliic in soul. Other beautiful allusions to TIrs. Browning may be found 
in 0)LC Word More^ Prospice^ and Mij Star, 



BY THt: FIRESIDE. 47 

With me, youth led ... I will speak now, 

No longer watch you as you sit 
Reading by firelight, that great brow 

And the spirit-small hand propping it, 
Mutely, my heart knows how — 1 1 5 

When, if I think but deep enough, 
You are wont to answer, prompt as rhyme ; 

And you, too, find without rebuff 

Response your soul seeks many a time. 

Piercing its fine flesh-stuff. 12c 

My own, confirm me! If I tread 

This path back, is it not in pride 
To think how little I dreamed it led 

To an age so blest that, by its side, 
Youth seems the waste instead ? 125 

My own, see where the years conduct ! 

At first, 'twas something our two souls 
Should mix as mists do ; each is sucked 

In each now : on, the new stream rolls, 
Whatever rocks obstruct. 130 

Think, when our one soul understands 

The great Word which makes all things new. 

When earth breaks up and heaven expands. 
How will the change strike me and you 

In the house not made with hands ? 135 

Oh I must feel your brain prompt mine, 

Your heart anticipate my heart. 
You must be just before, in fine, 

See and make me see, for your part, 
New depths of the divine! 140 



48 browning's poems. 

But who could have expected this 

When we two drew together first 
Just for the obvious liuman bliss, 

To satisfy life's daily thirst 
With a thing men seldom miss ? 145 

Come back with me to the first of all, 

Let us lean and love it over again, 
Let us now forget and now recall, 

Break the rosary in a pearly rain, 
And gather what we let fall ! 1 50 

What did I say ? — that a small bird sings 

All day long, save when a brown pair 
Of hawks from the wood float with wide wings 

Strained to a bell : 'gainst noonday glare 
You count the streaks and rings. 155 

But at afternoon or almost eve 

'Tis better ; then the silence grows 
To that degree, you half believe 

It must get rid of what it knows, 
Its bosom does so heave. 160 

Hither we walked then, side by side. 

Arm in arm and cheek to cheek. 
And still I questioned or replied. 

While my heart, convulsed to really speak, 
Lay choking in its pride. 165 

Silent the crumbling bridge we cross. 

And pity and praise the chapel sweet. 
And care about the fresco's loss. 

And wish for our souls a like retreat. 
And wonder at the moss. 1 70 

151. What did I say?— The description is here resumed, which w^$ 
broken ofif at 1. 100. 



BY THE FIRESIDE. 49 

Stoop and kneel on the settle under, 

Look through the window's grated square : 

Nothing to see ! For fear of plunder, 
The cross is down and the altar bare, 

As if thieves don't fear thunder. 175 

We stoop and look in through the grate, 

See the little porch and rustic door. 
Read duly the dead builder's date ; 

Then cross the bridge that w^e crossed before, 
Take the path again — butw^ait! 180 

Oh moment one and infinite ! 

The water slips o'er stock and stone ; 
The West is tender, hardly bright : 

How gray at once is the evening grown — 
One star, its chrysolite! 185 

We two stood there with never a third. 

But each by each, as each knew well : 
The sights we saw and the sounds we heard, 

The lights and the shades made up a spell 
Till the trouble grew and stirred. 190 

Oh, the little more, and how much it is! 

And the little less, and what worlds away ! 
How a sound shall quicken content to bliss, 

Or a breath suspend the blood's best play, 
And life be a proof of this! 195 

Had she willed it, still had stood the screen 
So slight, so sure, 'twixt my love and her: 

I could fix her face with a guard between. 
And find her soul as when friends confer. 

Friends — lovers that might have been. 200 

185. Clirysolite.— Greek xP^<^o^ and Ati^og, gold-stone. Technically, a min- 
eral substance of a pale-green color. 



50 browning's poems. 

For my heart had a touch of the woodland time, 

Wanting to sleep now over its best. 
Shake the whole tree in the summer-prime, 

But bring to the last leaf no such test ! 
*' Hold the last fast!" runs the rhyme. 205 

For a chance to make your little much, 

To gain a lover and lose a friend, 
Venture the tree and a myriad such, 

When nothing you mar but the year can mend: 
But a last leaf — fear to touch ! 210 

Yet should it unfasten itself and fall 

Eddying down till it find your face 
At some slight wind — best chance of all ! 

Be your heart henceforth its dwelling-place 
You trembled to forestall ! 215 

Worth how well, those dark gray eyes. 
That hair so dark and dear, how worth 

That a man should strive and agonize. 
And taste a veriest hell on earth 

For the hope of such a prize ! 220 

You might have turned and tried a man, 

Set him a space to weary and wear. 
And prove which suited more your plan, 

His best of hope or his worst despair. 
Yet end as he began. 225 

But you spared me this, like the heart you are. 

And filled my empty heart at a word. 
If two lives join, there is oft a scar, 

They are one and one, with a shadowy third; 
One near one is too far. 230 



BY THE FIRESIDE. 51 

A moment after, and hands unseen 

Were hanging the night around us fast; 
But we knew that a bar was broken between 

Life and life: we were mixed at last 
In spite of the mortal screen. 235 

The forests had done it; there they stood ; 

We caught for a moment the powers at play : 
They had mingled us so, for once and good. 

Their work was done — we might go or stay. 
They relapsed to their ancient mood. 240 

How the world is made for each of us ! 

How all we perceive and know in it 
Tends to some moment's product thus, 

When a soul declares itself — to wit, 
By its fruit, the thing it does ! 245 

Be hate that fruit, or love that fruit, 

It forwards the general deed of man, 
And each of the Many helps to recruit 

The life of the race by a general plan; 
Each living his own, to boot. 250 

I am named and known by that moment's feat; 

There took my station and degree; 
So grew my own small life complete, 

As ]N'ature obtained her best of me — 
One born to love you, sweet ! 255 



2*A-245. "With Mr. Browning," says Prof. Dowden, "those moments are 
xnosi p:lorious in which the obscure tendency of many years has been revealed 
by the Ughtning of sudden passion, or in which a resolution that changes the 
current of hfe has been taken in reliance upon that insight which vivid emo- 
tion bestows ; and those periods of our history are charged most fully with 
moral purpose, which take their direction from moments such as these,"' 
Here it is the remembrance of one of those supreme moments which deter- 
mined the issue of his life, that leads the speaker of the poem to exclaim: 
" How the world is made for each of us I" etc. 



52 browning's poems. 

And to watch you sink by the fireside now 

Back again, as you mutely sit 
Musing by fire-light, that great brow 

And the spirit-small hand propping it, 
Yonder, my heart knows how ! 260 

So, earth has gained by one man the more. 

And the gain of earth must be heaven's gain too; 

And the whole is well worth thinking o'er 
When autumn comes: which I mean to do 

One day, as I said before. 265 



My Last Duchess. 
Ferrara. 



This poem— published in Bells -^nd Pomegranates— is the first dtrcc* pro- 
genitor of Andn-a del Sarto and the other great blank-verse monologues; , 
in it we see the form, save for the scarcely appreciable presence of rhyme, 
alreadv developed. The poem is a subtle study in the jealousy of egoism— 
not a study so much as a creation; and it places before us, as if bitten out by 
the etcher's acid, a typical autocrat of the Renaissance, with his serene self- 
composure of selfishness, quiet uncompromising cruelty, and genuine devo- 
tion to art. The «cene and the actors in this httle Italian drama stand out 
before us with the most natural clearness; there is some telling touch in 
every line, an infinitude of cunningly careless details, instinct with sugges- 
tion, and an appearance through it all of simple artless ease, such as only the 
^ery finest art can give. 

That's my last Duchess painted on the wall, 

Looking as if she were alive. I call 

That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolf's hands 

Worked busily a day, and there she stands. 

Will 't please you sit a-nd look at her ? I said 5 

"" Fra Pandolf " by design, for never read 

Strangers like you that pictured countenance, 

Tlie depth and passion of its earnest glance, 

8. Frk Pandolf.— An imaginary artist, as also Cliiu« of Inusbruck in 
the last verse. 



MY LAST DUCHESS. 53 

But to myself they turned (since none puts by 

The curtain I have drawn for you, but I) i^^ 

And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst, 

How such a glance came there; so, not the first 

Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, 't was not 

Her husband's presence only, called that spot 

Of joy into the Duchess' cheek: perhaps 15 

Era Pandolf chanced to say " Her mantle laps 

Over my lady's wrist too much," or *' Paint 

Must never hope to reproduce the faint 

Half-flush that dies along her throat:" such stuff 

Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough 20 

For calling up that spot of joy. She had 

A heart — how shall I say ?— too soon made glad, 

Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er 

She looked on, and her looks went everywhere. 

Sir, 't was all one ! My favor at her breast, 25 

The dropping of the daylight in the West, 

The bough of cherries ^^ome officious fool 

Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule 

She rode with round the terrace — all and each 

Would draw from her alike the approving speech, 30 

Or blush, at least. She thanked men, — good! but thanked 

Somehow — I know not how — as if she ranked 

My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name 

With anybody's gift. Who'd stoop to blame 

This sort of trifling ? Even had you skill -: 

In speech — (which I have not) — to make your will 

Quite clear to such an one, and say, ' ' Just this 

Or that m you disgusts me; here you miss. 

Or there exceed the mark" —and if she let 

Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set 40 

Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse, 

— E'en then would be some stooping; and I choose 

Never to stoop. Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt, 



54 brownii^g's poems. » 

Whene'er I passed lier; but who passed without 44 

Much the same smile ? This grew; I gave commands; 

Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands 

As if alive. Will 't please you rise ? We'll meet 

The company below, then. I repeat 

The Count your master's known munificence 

Is ample warrant that no just pretense 50 

Of mine for dowry will be disallowed; 

Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed 

At starting, is my object. Nay, we'll go 

Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though, 

Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity, 55 

Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!" 



45. I gave coinmands.— It is not necessary to suppose that the "com- 
mands" were for her death. Prolonged cruelty would have served his pur- 
pose. 

54. Notice Neptune. — As they are about to descend the stairs, the soul 
less old virtuoso calls the envoy's attention to a work of art in the courtyarc 
below, of which he is especially proud. 



COLLEGE ENTRANCE REQUIREMENTS 
IN ENGLISH 

READING AND PRACTICE. — The candidate for admission will be required 
to write a paragraph or two on each of several topics chosen by him from a con- 
siderable number — perhaps ten or fifteen— set before him on the exammation 

^^The candidate is expected to read intelligently all the books prescribed. He 
should read them as he reads other books; he is expected, not to know them 
minutely, but to have freshly in mind their most important parts. 

In preparation tor this part of the requirement it is important that the candi- 
date shall have been instructed in the fundamental principles of rhetoric. 

STUDY AND PRACTICE — A certain number of books will be prescribed for 
careful study. This part of the examination will be upon subject-matter, 
literary form, ana logical structure, and will also test the candidate's abihty to 
express his knowledge with clearness and accuracy. ^ . , . .t. 

In addition, the candidate may be required to answer questions involving the 
essentials of Enghsh grammar, and questions on the leading facts in those 
periods of English literary history to v/hich the prescribed works belong. 
Complete List of Works required for the years 1903- 1908 



READING AN J PRACTICE 



Serial number 
in the English 
Classic Series 



Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield 

Tennyson's The Princess 

Carlyle*s Essay on Burns 

Shakesp^Jare's Julius Caesar 

Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice . 
Addison's Sir Roger de Coverley . . . 
Lowell's The Vision of Sir Launfal. . 

Scott's Ivanhoe (Condensed) 

Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner — 

George Eliot's Silas Marner 

Shakespeare's Macbeth 

Scott's Lady of the Lake 

Tennyson's Lancelot and Elaine . . 

Tennyson's The Passing of Arthur . 
Tennyson's Gareth and Lynette .... 

Crving's Life of Goldsmith 

STUDY AND PRACTICE 

Macaulay's Essay on Miltou 

Shakespeare's Macbeth 

Macaulay's Essay on Addison 

Burke's Speech on Concination. . , . 

Milton's L' Allegro and II Penseroso 

Milton's Comus 

Milton's Lycidas 

Macaulay's Life of Johnson 

Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. 



195-196 
70 

Kellogg's Ed. 

Kellogg's Ed. 

18 

129 

137-138 

17 

170-171-172 

Kellogg's Ed. 

236-237-238 

230-234-235 

233-234-235 

233-234-235 

t 

102-103 

Kellogg's Ed, 

104-105 

221-222 

2 

29 
46 
178 
Kellogg's 



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30 " 

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36 " 

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24 *' 
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12 ** 
30 



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3.60 
3.60 
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2.40 
3.00 
2.40 
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1.20 
1.20 
3.00 



1903- 
1903- 
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— 1908 

I90S 

1908 

1908 



An abridged edition published as No. 35 of Maynard's English Classic Serie* 
^Not y«t published in Maynard's English Clasgic Sehd^ Aug\ist» ¥Q^^ 



ej^GLISH LITERAlURE REQUIRED 
BY THE REGENTS' SYLLABUS 

Column I. Serial number in Maynard's English Classic Scries. 

Column IL Price per copy, postpaid. 
Column III. Price per dozen copies, postpaid. 



t3S-S26 



ELEMENTARY ENGLISH 
yongf ellow— Evangelir e 

FIRST-YEAR ENGLISH 

;^RAMMAR 

Irving — Essays from the Sketch-Book: "•The 
Mutability of Literature/' and "The Stage 

Coach ** /■ 223-224 

.ITERATURE ! 

Irving — Essays from the Sketch-Book: ••The 
Voyage," "The Wife," "Rip Van Wink^- " 
••The Art of Book-Making," "Christmas." 
"The Stage-Coach," •* Christmas Eve," 
'•Christmas Bay," ••Stratford -on •Avon," 
*• The Legend of Sleepy Hollow " 

Scott — Ivanhoe 

Scott—The Lady of the Lake 

Longfellow — The Courtship of Miles Standish . . 

Whittier — Snow-Bound 



SECOND-YEAR ENGLISH 

.ITERAIURE 

Hawthorne— Twice-Told Tales : •• The Minister's 
Black Veil," ••Howe's Masquerade," ••Lady 
Eleanore's Mantle," ••Old Esther Dudley," 
••Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe," ••The 
Prophetic Pictures," •• David Swan," •'Sights 
from a Steeple " 

Addison — Sir Roger de Coverley 

Ruskin — Sesame and Lilies 

Coleridge — The Ancient Mariner 

Burns— The Cotter's Saturday Night 

ix)well — The Vision of Sir Launfai 

George Eliot — Silas Marner 

Shakespeare — Julius Caesar 

Webster — First Bunker HiU OraUon 



223-224 

* 



236-237-238 
230 
130 



x8 

225-336 

17 

9 

X29 

170-171-172 
Kellogg'sEd 



n. 

-34 



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$2 4 



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.36 
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3.60 

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X.30 



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X.2C 
3.4« 

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Z.2C 

3.60 

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't' Where no prices are given, the woik has not yet been added to this seriei^ 
or 18 published ic an abridged fonc only September, xoo^. 



THIRD-YEAR ENGLISn 

LITERATURE 

Milton— L' Allegro and II Penseroso 

M'Uon — Comus 

LocKe— Of the Conduct of the Understanding. . 

Pope— Essay on Criticism 

Macaulay — Essay on Milton 

Carlyle— Essay on Burns 

Emerson — Compensation. 

Arnold— Sohrab and Rustum 

Shakespeare — The Merchant of Venice 

Shakespeare— As You Like It, 

Thackeray — The Virginians 

ENC^LISH READING 

Texts for the Academic Years 1903, 1904, and 1905 
-rOR GENERAL READING AND COMPOSITION 
WORK 

Shakespeare— The Merchant of Venice 

Shakespeare — Julius Caesar 

Addison— Sir Roger de Coverley 

Goldsmith— The Vicar of Wakefield 

Coleridge — The Ancient Mariner 

Scott — Ivanhoe 

Carlyle — Essay on Burns 

Tennyson — The Princess 

Lowell— The Vision of Sir Launfal 

George Eliot— Silas Marner 

FOR CAREFUL STUDY 

Burke — Speech on Conciliation 

Shakespeare — Macbeth 

Milton — Minor Poems; 

L' Allegro and II Penseroso 

Comus 

Lycidas, and Hymn on the Nativity ..... 

Macaulay — Essay on Milton 

Macaulay — Essay on Addison 

ADVANCED ENGLISH 

GRAMMAR _ , „ , ., ^, 

Irving— Essays from The Sketch-Book: " The 

Mutability of Literature/* and "The Stage- 
Coach" 

LITERATURE 

Scott — The Lady of the Lake 

ENGLISH COMPOSITION 

Scott — ^Ivanhoe 



in 



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1.20 


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* 

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170-171-172 

221-222 
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102-103 
104-105 



223-224 



.30 
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.L2 
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.24 
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236-237-238] .36 j 3.60 

i 



RHETORIC 

Ilawthorae — Twice-Told Tales : '• The Minister's" 
Black Veil,** **Howe*s Masquerade,** "Lady 
Eleanore*s Mantle,** " Old Esther Dudley, 
"Mr. Higginbotham*s Catastrophe,** "The 
Prophetic Pictures,** "David Swan," "Sights 
from a Steeple " 



AMERICAN SELECTIONS 



Cooper — The Last of the Mohicans 

Hawthorne — House of the Seven Gables 

Bryant — Thanatopsis 

Lowell — The Present Crisis, My Garden 

Acquaintance, A Glance Behind the Curtain. 

Commemoration Ode 

Longfellow — The Hanging of the Crane 

Taylor — Lars 

Mitchell — Reveries of a Bachelor 

Irving — The Alhambra. 

Emerson — Nature 

Franklin — Autobiography 

Washington — Farewell Address 

Lincoln — Gettysburg Address 



ENGLISH SELECTIONS 

Chaucer — The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales 

Spenser — Prothalamion 

Shakespeare — The Tempest 

Dryden — Song for St. Cecilia's Day, and Alexan- 
der's Feast 

Wordsworth — Laodameia, and Lines Composed 
Above Tintern Abbey 

Byron — The Prisoner of Chillon 

Tennyson — The Coming of Arthur f 

Tennyson — The Holy Grail t 

Browning- -The Lost Leader, The Boy and the 
Angel 

Browning — Herv^ Riel, Pheidippides 

Bacon — Essays on Studies, Truth, Travel 

Burke— -Speech on Conciliation 

Carlyle — Heroes and Hero Worship 

Macaulay — Essay on Bacon 



188-189 



Special No. 



47 



n. 



227 

112-113-114 

78 

78 



special No. 

27 
Kellogg*sEd 

39 



90 


.12 


4 


.12 


128 


.12 


91 


.12 


65 


.12 


210 


.12 


3 


.12 


221-222 


.24 



.36 

.12 



.35 
.12 
.30 



tTennyson*s The Holy Grail and The Coming of Arthur are published as 
Nos. 91 and 128 of Maynard's English Classic Series, bound in paper covers, at 
12 cents each, and they are also contained in Idylls of the King, No. 233-234-235 
Of the serres, bound in cioth, at 36 cents a copy. 



SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS 

KELLOGG'S EDITIONS 

EACH PLAY IN ONE VOLUME 
Text Carefully Expurgated for Use in Mixed Classes 
With Explanatory Notes, Examination Papers, and Plan of Study (Selected) 

By BRAINERD KELLOGG, LL.D. 

Oeanof the Faculty and Professor of the English Language and Liter aturt 
in the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute^ and author of a ^*' Text-Book on Rhet 
oric^'' a " Text-Book on English Literature^"* and ont o/the authors of Rjea 
£t* Kellogg*s ** Lessons in English.^"' 

The notes of English Editors have heen freely used; but they have beec 
4gorously pruned, or generously added to, wherever it was thought the^ migM 
better meet the needs of American School and College Students. 

We are confident that teachers who examine these editions will pronounce, 
them better adapted to the wants of the class-room than any other editiong 
published. 

Printed from large type and attractively bound in cloth. 

Besides the desirable text-book features already described, each volume con« 
tains a portrait of Shakeapearej his birthplace, editorial and general notices. 
Introduction to Shakespeare's grammar, a plan of study for perfect possession 
of the play, introduction to the play, and critical opinions. 

The following volumes are now ready: 

Merchant of Venice Julius Caesar 

Macbeth ' Tempest 

Hamlet King Henry V 

K^ng Lear Ki^g Henry IV, Part J 

J!^^^^.V!?n As You Like It 

tCing Richard Hi 

The Winter's Tale ^ Midsummer-Night's Dreais 

Twelfth Night Othello 

King John Coriolanus 

Mudi Ado About Nothing Romeo and Juliet 

Mailing price, 30 cents a volume 

MAYNARD, MERRILL, & CO., Publishers 



ABERNETHY'S 
AMERICAN LITERATURE 

By J. W. ABERNETHY, Ph.D. 

Principal of Berkalcy Institute^ Brooklyn^ AT. K. 

510 pages, i2mo, cloth. Price. $;.xo 

The author's lon^ and conspicuously successful experience 
as a teacher, and the time and thought he has devoted to the 
work encourage us to beUeve that this book will be particularly 
adapted to the varying needs of his fellow-teachers. 

The plan of the book includes a brief account of the growth of 
our literature considered as part of our national history, with 
Buch biographical and critical material as will best make the 
first-hand study of American authors interesting and profitablCc 

One of the most interesting features of "iihe book is the supple^ 
menting of the author^s critical estimates of the value of the 
wrork of the more important American writers with opinions 
quoted from contemporary sources. Other strong points are the 
attention given to more recent contributions to American litera- 
ture, and the fact that Southern literature is accorded a con- 
sideration commensurate with its interest and value. 

The pedagogical merit of the book is indicated by the care 
which has been given to the production of a teaching apparatus 
which is at once simple and entirely adequate. At the end of 
each chapter, two lists of selections are provided for each im- 
portant author, one for critical study, the other for outside 
reading. Lists of reading material for the historical background 
also are given. Study along the lines indicated will lead to a 
closer correlation of history and literature than is usually se- 
cured, and to a more just appreciation of the literature. 

The books included in the list at the end of the work consti- 
tute an ample and fairly complete library of biography and 
criticism for students of American literature. 

From G. Herbert Clarke, Professor of the English Language 
And Literature, Mercer University, Macon, Georgia: 

' * Probably my good will towards the book is best shown by 
the fact that 1 have adopted and am now using it in a class of 
fifty-five sophomores. The author knows his facts, relates 
them simply, and shows a not inconsiderable appreciation of 
literary forms and resources. In addition I find his character 
analyses judicial and catholic and couched in even diction 
i^ather than, as is so often the case m texts of this kind, in 
tc^antmg rhetoric." 

MAYNARD, MERRILL, & CO., Publishers 



KELLOGG'S 
TEXT-BOOK ON ENGLISH LITERATURE 

With copious extracts from threading authors, English and American, and full 
instructions as to the method in which these are to be studied Adapted for 
use in Colleges, High Schools, Academies, etc. By Bramerd Kellogg, LL.D.. 
Dean of th- Faculty and Professor of the English Language and Literature 
in the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, Author of a ♦'Text-Book on Rhetoric, 
and one of the authors of Reed and Kellogg's **Graded Lessons in Englisn,*' 
••Higher Lessons in English," and **High School Grammar/ 

THE BOOK IS DIVIDED INTO THE FOLLOWING PERIODSt 

Period I. — Before the Norman Conquest, 670-1066. Period II. — From the 
Conquest to Chaucer*s death, 1066-1400, Period III.— From Chaucer's death 
to Elizabeth, 1400-1538. Period IV.— Elizabeth's reign, 1 558-1603. Period 
V. —From Elizabeth's death to the Restoration, 1603-1660. Period VI.-* 
From the Restoration to Swift's death, 1 660-1 74S. Period VII.— From Swift's 
Death to the French Revolution. 174S-1789. Period VIII.— From the French 
Revolution, I789» onwards. 

Each Period is preceded by a lesson containing a brief resume of the great 
historical events that have had somewhat to do in shaping or in coloring the 
literature of that period. 

Extracts, as many and as ample as the limits of a text-book would allow, have 
been made from the principal writers of each Period. Such are selected as 
contain the characteristic traits of their authors, both in thought and expression, 
&nd but few of these extracts have ever seen the light in books of selections — 
none of them have been worn threadbare by use, or have lost their freshness by 
the pupil's familiarity with them in the school readers. 

It teaches the pupil how the selections are to be studied, soliciting and exact- 
ing his judgment at every step of the way which leads from the author's diction 
up through his style and thought to the author himself; and in many other ways 
!t places the pupil on the best possible footing with the authors whose acquaint- 
tnce it is his business, as well as his pleasure, to make* 

Short estimates of the leading authors, made by the best English and Ameri<= 
!an critics, have been inserted. 1 

The author has endeavored to make a practical, common-sense text-boofc— • 

one that would so educate the student that he would know and enjoy good 

literature. 

X2mo9 cloth, 485 pp. Price^ $1.25 

MAYNARD, MERRILL, Sc CO., Publishers 

New York 



The best literature at lowest prices 

MAYNARD'S 
ENGLISH CLASSIC SERIES 

Includes more than 200 numbers 

The purpose of this series is to offer in inexpensive form only 
the best literature either for supplementary reading or for critical 
study, and it embraces specimens from the writings of the most 
noted English and American authors, as well as translations 
from ancient classics. 

!^ET PRICES TO TEACHERS AND SCHOOLS 
FOR INTRODUCTION OR SUBSEQUENT 
USE, POSTAGE OR EXPRESSAGE PAID 

To secure reduced rates per hundred or per thousand copies, 
that number of a kind must be ordered ; that is, either one hundred 
single numbers or one hundred double numbers. 

Specimen copies will be sent to teachers at the dozen rate. 
This rate will also be allowed to schools on less than a dozen. 

A descriptive catalogue may be had upon request. 

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Dozen 

Single Numbers, Paper Covers. . . .$1.20 
Single Numbers, Board Covers*. . . 2.00 
Double Numbers, Cloth Covers.... 2.40 
Triple Numbers, Cloth Covers 3.60 

Per 
Dozen 

Milton — Paradise Lost, Book I , $3.00 

Milton — Paradise Lost, Books I. and II 4.20 

Chaucer — The Canterbury Tales. The Prologue 3.60 

Chaucer — The Squieres Tale 3.60 

Chaucer — The Knightes Tale 4.20 

Cooper — The Last of the Mohicans 4.20 

, Goldsmith — She Stoops to Conquer 3.00 

fiowland — Homer^s Iliad, Books I. and VI 3.00 

Howland — Homer *s Odyssey, Books I., V., IX., and X 3.0c 

Howland — Horace's The Art of Poetry 3.00 

Burt — The Story of the German Iliad 5.00 

Shakespeare's Plays, Kellogg's Editions 3.00 

♦Numbers 127, 132, 133, 134, 150, 151, i53, 168, 173, 1S4, 
200, and 215 only are bound in boards. 

MAYNARD, MERRILL, & CO., Publishers 



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